Quotes about destiny
page 7

Isaac Asimov photo

“The house was somehow very lonely at night and Dr. Darell found that the fate of the Galaxy made remarkably little difference while his daughter’s mad little life was in danger.”

Isaac Asimov (1920–1992) American writer and professor of biochemistry at Boston University, known for his works of science fiction …

Source: The Foundation series (1951–1993), Second Foundation (1953), Chapter 11 “Stowaway”

Tad Williams photo
Nikolai Gogol photo
Matthew Arnold photo

“Yet they, believe me, who await
No gifts from Chance, have conquer’d Fate.”

Matthew Arnold (1822–1888) English poet and cultural critic who worked as an inspector of schools

Source: Resignation (1849), l. 248-249

Charles Baudelaire photo

“The phrase "a literature of decadence" implies a scale of literature: infancy, childhood, adolescence, etc. This term, I would say, supposes something fateful and providential, like an inescapable decree; and it is completely unjust to reproach us for the fulfillment of a law that is mysterious. All I can understand of this academic saying is that it is shameful to obey this law pleasurably, and that we are guilty of rejoicing in our destiny.”

Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867) French poet

Le mot littérature de décadence implique qu'il y a une échelle de littératures, une vagissante, une puérile, une adolescente, etc. Ce terme, veux-je dire, suppose quelque chose de fatal et de providentiel, comme un décret inéluctable; et il est tout à fait injuste de nous reprocher d'accomplir la loi mystérieuse. Tout ce que je puis comprendre dans la parole académique, c'est qu'il est honteux d'obéir à cette loi avec plaisir, et que nous sommes coupables de nous réjouir dans notre destinée.
XI: "Notes nouvelles sur Edgar Poe III," I http://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Edgar_Poe_III._Notes_nouvelles_sur_Edgar_Poe_%28L%E2%80%99Art_romantique%29#I
L'art romantique (1869)

John Ogilby photo
John C. Wright photo
Daniel Defoe photo

“The best of men cannot suspend their fate:
The good die early, and the bad die late.”

Daniel Defoe (1660–1731) English trader, writer and journalist

Character of the Late Dr. S. Annesley (1715).

Jean-Paul Marat photo
Letitia Elizabeth Landon photo
Giordano Bruno photo

“Their fate will be in each other's hands as they decide whether to share or to shaft.”

Robert Kilroy-Silk (1942) British politician

Shafted, 2001
Frequently shown as a running joke on Have I Got News For You

David Lloyd George photo
Herbert Marcuse photo

“The world of their [the bourgeois’] predecessors was a backward, pre-technological world, a world with the good conscience of inequality and toil, in which labor was still a fated misfortune; but a world in which man and nature were not yet organized as things and instrumentalities. With its code of forms and manners. with the style and vocabulary of its literature and philosophy. this past culture expressed the rhythm and content of a universe in which valleys and forests, villages and inns, nobles and villains, salons and courts were a part of the experienced reality. In the verse and prose of this pre-technological culture is the rhythm of those who wander or ride in carriages. who have the time and the pleasure to think, contemplate, feel and narrate. It is an outdated and surpassed culture, and only dreams and childlike regressions can recapture it. But this culture is, in some of its decisive elements. also a post-technological one. Its most advanced images and positions seem to survive their absorption into administered comforts and stimuli; they continue to haunt the consciousness with the possibility of their rebirth in the consummation of technical progress. They are the expression of that free and conscious alienation from the established forms of life with which literature and the arts opposed these forms even where they adorned them. In contrast to the Marxian concept, which denotes man's relation to himself and to his work in capitalist society, the artistic alienation is the conscious transcendence of the alienated existence—a “higher level” or mediated alienation. The conflict with the world of progress, the negation of the order of business, the anti-bourgeois elements in bourgeois literature and art are neither due to the aesthetic lowliness of this order nor to romantic reaction—nostalgic consecration of a disappearing stage of civilization. “Romantic” is a term of condescending defamation which is easily applied to disparaging avant-garde positions, just as the term “decadent” far more often denounces the genuinely progressive traits of a dying culture than the real factors of decay. The traditional images of artistic alienation are indeed romantic in as much as they are in aesthetic incompatibility with the developing society. This incompatibility is the token of their truth. What they recall and preserve in memory pertains to the future: images of a gratification that would dissolve the society which suppresses it”

Source: One-Dimensional Man (1964), pp. 59-60

Amy Winehouse photo
Jerry Coyne photo
Phillis Wheatley photo
Thomas Campbell photo

“To bear is to conquer our fate.”

Thomas Campbell (1777–1844) British writer

On visiting a Scene in Argyleshire
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

Douglas Coupland photo
Yevgeny Yevtushenko photo

“No people are uninteresting.
Their fate is like the chronicle of planets.
Nothing in them is not particular,
and planet is dissimilar from planet.”

Yevgeny Yevtushenko (1932–2017) Russian poet, film director, teacher

"People" (1961), line 1; Robin Milner-Gulland and Peter Levi (trans.) Selected Poems (London: Penguin, 2008) p. 85.

Kevin Warwick photo

“I was born human. But this was an accident of fate - a condition merely of time and place. I believe it's something we have the power to change.”

Kevin Warwick (1954) British robotics and cybernetics researcher

in Kevin Warwick "Cyborg 1.0", Wired, pp.145-151, February 2000.

Omar Khayyám photo

“Up from Earth's Centre through the Seventh Gate
rose, and on the Throne of Saturn sate;
And many a Knot unravel'd by the Road;
But not the Master-knot of Human Fate.”

Omar Khayyám (1048–1131) Persian poet, philosopher, mathematician, and astronomer

The Rubaiyat (1120)

Chairil Anwar photo

“I don't intend to share fate,
Fate which is a universal loneliness.”

Chairil Anwar (1922–1949) Indonesian poet

"Pemberian Tahu" ["A Proclamation"] (1946), p. 184
The Complete Poetry and Prose of Chairil Anwar (trans. Burton Raffel)

John Fletcher photo

“Man is his own star, and the soul that can
Render an honest and a perfect man
Commands all light, all influence, all fate.
Nothing to him falls early, or too late.
Our acts our angels are, or good or ill,
Our fatal shadows that walk by us still.”

Epilogue. Compare: "Every man hath a good and a bad angel attending on him in particular all his life long", Robert Burton, Anatomy of Melancholy, part i. sect. 2, memb. 1, subsect. 2.
The Honest Man's Fortune, (1613; published 1647)

Franz Kafka photo
Edward Witten photo
Natalie Merchant photo
Letitia Elizabeth Landon photo
Philip Schaff photo

“Editions and Revisions. The printed Bible text of Luther had the same fate as the written text of the old Itala and Jerome's Vulgate. It passed through innumerable improvements and mis-improvements. The orthography and inflections were modernized, obsolete words removed, the versicular division introduced (first in a Heidelberg reprint, 1568), the spurious clause of the three witnesses inserted in 1 John 5:7 (first by a Frankfurt publisher, 1574), the third and fourth books of Ezra and the third book of the Maccabees added to the Apocrypha, and various other changes effected, necessary and unnecessary, good and bad. Elector August of Saxony tried to control the text in the interest of strict Lutheran orthodoxy, and ordered the preparation of a standard edition (1581). But it was disregarded outside of Saxony.
Gradually no less than eleven or twelve recensions came into use, some based on the edition of 1545, others on that of 1546. The most careful recension was that of the Canstein Bible Institute, founded by a pious nobleman, Carl Hildebrand von Canstein (1667-1719) in connection with Francke's Orphan House at Halle. It acquired the largest circulation and became the textus receptus of the German Bible.
With the immense progress of biblical learning in the present century, the desire for a timely revision of Luther's version was more and more felt. Revised versions with many improvements were prepared by Joh.- Friedrich von Meyer, a Frankfurt patrician (1772-1849), and Dr. Rudolf Stier (1800-1862), but did not obtain public authority.
At last a conservative official revision of the Luther Bible was inaugurated by the combined German church governments in 1863, with a view and fair prospect of superseding all former editions in public use.”

Philip Schaff (1819–1893) American Calvinist theologian

Luther's Bible club

Clay Shirky photo
Patrick White photo
James Graham, 1st Marquess of Montrose photo

“He either fears his fate too much,
Or his deserts are small,
That dares not put it to the touch
To gain or lose it all.”

James Graham, 1st Marquess of Montrose (1612–1650) Scottish nobleman, poet and soldier of the Wars of the Three Kingdoms

My Dear and only Love. Compare: "That puts it not unto the touch/ To win or lose it all", Sir W. F. P. Napier, Montrose and the Covenanters, vol. ii. p. 566.

Michael Shea photo

“Is it not unsettling to consider the blind unlikelihoods that shape one’s fate?”

Michael Shea (1946–2014) writer

Source: A Quest for Simbilis (1974), Chapter 7, “The Stronghold of Simbilis” (p. 134)

Hunter S. Thompson photo
Alexander Pope photo

“A brave man struggling in the storms of fate,
And greatly falling with a falling state.
While Cato gives his little senate laws,
What bosom beats not in his country's cause?”

Alexander Pope (1688–1744) eighteenth century English poet

Source: Prologue to Mr. Addison's Cato (1713), Line 21. Pope also uses the reference, "Like Cato, give his little Senate laws", in his Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot (1734), Prologue to Imitations of Horace.

Walter Scott photo
George Villiers, 2nd Duke of Buckingham photo

“The blackest Ink of Fate, sure, was my Lot,
And, when she writ my Name, she made a blot.”

George Villiers, 2nd Duke of Buckingham (1628–1687) English statesman and poet

Pretty-man, Act III, sc. iv
The Rehearsal (1671)

Jane Austen photo

“I am rather impatient to know the fate of my best gown.”

Jane Austen (1775–1817) English novelist

Letter to Cassandra (1799-05-17) [Letters of Jane Austen -- Brabourne Edition]
Letters

David Baddiel photo
Stanisław Lem photo
Tom Petty photo

“I saw an angel, I saw my fate.
I can only thank God it was not too late.”

Tom Petty (1950–2017) American musician

Angel Dream (No. 4)
Lyrics, Songs and Music from "She's the One" (1996)

Corneliu Zelea Codreanu photo

“Those who think that the Jews are poor unfortunates, arrived here by chance, carried by the wind, led by fate, and so on, are mistaken. All the Jews who exist on the face of the earth form a great community, bound by blood and Talmudic religion. They are parts of a truly implacable state, which has laws, plans and leaders who formulate these plans and carry them through. The whole thing is organised in the form of a so-called 'Kehillah'. This is why we are faced, not with isolated Jews, but with a constituted force, the Jewish community. In any of our cities or countries where a given number of Jews are gathered, a Kehillah is immediately set up, that is to say the Jewish community. This Kehillah has its leaders, its own judiciary, and so on. And it is in this small Kehillah, whether at the city or at the national level, that all the plans are formed : how to win the local politicians, the authorities; how to work one's way into circles where it would be useful to get admitted, for example, among the magistrates, the state employees, the senior officials; these plans must be carried out to take a certain economic sector away from a Romanian's hands; how an honest representative of an authority opposed to the Jewish interests could be eliminated; what plans to apply, when, oppressed, the population rebels and bursts in anti-Semitic movements.”

Corneliu Zelea Codreanu (1899–1938) Romanian politician

For My Legionaries: The Iron Guard (1936), Jewish Problem

Osama bin Laden photo
Ilana Mercer photo
Tadamichi Kuribayashi photo
George Boole photo

“You will feel interested to know the fate of my mathematical speculations in Cambridge. One of the papers is already printed in the Mathematical Journal. Another, which I sent a short time ago, has been very favourably received, and will shortly be printed together with one I had previously sent.”

George Boole (1815–1864) English mathematician, philosopher and logician

George Boole in letter to a friend, 1840, cited in: R. H. Hutton, " Professor Boole http://books.google.com/books?id=pfMEAAAAQAAJ&pg=PA147," in: The British Quarterly Review. (1866), p. 147; Cited in Des MacHale. George Boole: his life and work, Boole Press, 1985. p. 52
1840s

Ihara Saikaku photo

“To make a fortune some assistance from fate is essential. Ability alone is insufficient.”

Ihara Saikaku (1642–1693) Japanese writer

Book III, ch. 4.
The Japanese Family Storehouse (1688)

Mitt Romney photo
Omar Khayyám photo

“Would but some wing'ed Angel ere too late
Arrest the yet unfolded Roll of Fate,
And make the stern Recorder otherwise
Enregister, or quite obliterate!”

Omar Khayyám (1048–1131) Persian poet, philosopher, mathematician, and astronomer

The Rubaiyat (1120)

Letitia Elizabeth Landon photo
Robert Seymour Bridges photo

“Simple and brave, his faith awoke
Ploughmen to struggle with their fate;
Armies won battles when he spoke,
And out of Chaos sprang the state.”

Robert Seymour Bridges (1844–1930) British writer

Washington by Robert Bridges (1858 - 1941), American journalist and poet, who wrote under the pen name "Droch".
Misattributed

Theodor Mommsen photo
Davy Crockett photo
Samuel Johnson photo

“Must helpless man, in ignorance sedate,
Roll darkling down the torrent of his fate?”

Samuel Johnson (1709–1784) English writer

Source: Vanity of Human Wishes (1749), Line 345

Diogenes Laërtius photo
Barbara Roberts photo
Henry Temple, 3rd Viscount Palmerston photo
Shashi Tharoor photo

“A philosopher is a lover of wisdom, not of knowledge, which for all its great uses ultimately suffers from the crippling effect of ephemerality. All knowledge is transient linked to the world around it and subject to change as the world changes, whereas wisdom, true wisdom is eternal immutable. To be philosophical one must love wisdom for its own sake, accept its permanent validity and yet its perpetual irrelevance. It is the fate of the wise to understand the process of history and yet never to shape it.”

The Great Indian Novel
Variant: A philosopher is a lover of wisdom, not of knowledge, which for all its great uses ultimately suffers from the crippling effect of ephemerality. All knowledge is transient linked to the world around it and subject to change as the world changes, whereas wisdom, true wisdom is eternal immutable. To be philosophical one must love wisdom for its own sake, accept its permanent validity and yet its perpetual irrelevance. It is the fate of the wise to understand the process of history and yet never to shape it.

Morarji Desai photo

“Fate gets you into positions of power. Life takes you there. I only do my duty and service to the people. I take all conditions as they come cheerfully and do my duty.”

Morarji Desai (1896–1995) Former Indian Finance Minister, Freedom Fighters, Former prime minister

Morarji Desai speaks about life and celibacy

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow photo

“And yet, through the gloom and the light,
The fate of a nation was riding that night.”

Pt. I, The Landlord's Tale: Paul Revere's Ride, st. 8.
Tales of a Wayside Inn (1863-1874)

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow photo

“Thy fate is the common fate of all;
Into each life some rain must fall,
Some days must be dark and dreary.”

"The Rainy Day", Bentley's Miscellany ( December 1841 http://books.google.com/books?id=pW8AAAAAYAAJ&q=%22Thy+fate+is+the+common+fate+of+all+Into+each+life+some+rain+must+fall+some+days+must+be+dark+and+dreary%22&pg=PA626#v=onepage).

Robert G. Ingersoll photo
John Buchan photo
Otto Ohlendorf photo
Camille Paglia photo
Colin Wilson photo
Joseph Conrad photo

“I think there are three possible scenarios for the future of Chinese writing, in all of which the government plays a major role. In the first, and at present apparently the least likely scenario, the government abandons its hostility to an expanded role for Pinyin and instead fosters a climate of digraphia and biliteracy in which those who can do so become literate in both characters and Pinyin, and those who cannot are at least literate in Pinyin. This is essentially a reversion to the Latinization movement of the 1930s and 1940s, when Mao Zedong and other high Communist Party officials like Xu Teli, the commissioner of education in Yan'an, lent their prestigious support to the New Writing. Such a change within the governing bureaucracy would in all likelihood result in an explosion of activity that might end in Pinyin ascendancy in use over characters in less than a generation.
In the second scenario the government adopts a policy of benign indifference that involves abandoning its hostility toward Pinyin but without actively supporting it, leaving it up to the rival protagonists of the two systems to contest for supremacy among themselves. This is likely to result in a somewhat longer struggle.
In the third scenario the government continues its present policy of repression, resulting in a much more protracted struggle (though surely not as long as the fascinating parallel struggle between Latin and Italian in Italy, where it took 500 [! ] years after Dante’s start in 1292 for academics, the last holdouts, to finally abandon their long resistance and start using Italian in university lectures).47 In this long struggle, PCs and mobile phones and other innovations still to come will undoubtedly allow more and more advocates of writing reform to escape the stranglehold of officialdom, to the point where (in a century or so?) characters are finally relegated to the status of Latin in the West.
My own view is that this is actually the least likely scenario, the most probable one being that the Chinese pragmatism that has manifested itself so strongly in economics will extend further into writing, and that, perhaps sooner rather than later, given the success of the promotion of Mandarin, some influential Party bureaucrats will finally arrive at the conclusion that the "some day in the future" anticipated by Mao has arrived, and that wholehearted Party support should now be unleashed for his anticipated "basic reform."”

John DeFrancis (1911–2009) American linguist

In any case it is basically all a matter of time. And the decisive factor that will seal the ultimate fate of Chinese characters is the new reality, noted by a perceptive observer, that "the PC is mightier than the Pen."
"The Prospects for Chinese Writing Reform" (2006, p. 20-21) http://sino-platonic.org/complete/spp171_chinese_writing_reform.pdf
"The Prospects for Chinese Writing Reform" (2006)

“There is no fate that plans men's lives. Whatever comes to us, good or bad, is usually the result of our own action or lack of action.”

Herbert N. Casson (1869–1951) Canadian journalist and writer

Herbert N. Casson cited in: Forbes magazine (1950) The Forbes scrapbook of Thoughts on the business of life. p. 218
1950s and later

Jacques Delille photo

“Fate chooses our relatives, we choose our friends.”

Jacques Delille (1738–1813) French poet and translator

Le sort fait les parents, le choix fait les amis.
Malheur at Pitié (1803), canto I.

Roman Dmowski photo

“The nation becomes the master of its fate not only when it has many good sons, but also when it possesses enough strength to restrain its bad ones.”

Roman Dmowski (1864–1939) Polish politician

"Podstawy polityki polskiej", Przegląd Wszechpolski (July 1905): 343, 349, 358-359.

Letitia Elizabeth Landon photo

“Oh, who—reposed on some fond breast,
Love's own delicious place of rest—
Reading faith in the watching eyes,
Feeling the heart beat with its sighs,
Could know regrets, or doubts, or cares,
That we had bound our fate with theirs!”

Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802–1838) English poet and novelist

The Sisters from The London Literary Gazette: 13th March 1824 Metrical Tales - Tale III.
The Vow of the Peacock (1835)

Imre Kertész photo
Nguyễn Du photo

“How sorrowful is women's lot!" she cried.
"We all partake of woe, our common fate.”

Source: The Tale of Kiều (1813), Lines 83–84

Edward Jenks photo
John F. Kennedy photo

“We can say with some assurance that, although children may be the victims of fate, they will not be the victims of our neglect.”

John F. Kennedy (1917–1963) 35th president of the United States of America

"Remarks upon signing the Maternal and Child Health and Mental Retardation Planning Bill (434)" (24 October 1963)]
1963

Francis Parkman photo

“…a fate I wouldn't wish on my worst enemy…”

Paul DiLascia (1959–2008) American software developer

on being someone who is writing a C++ compiler, 1993/2
About language

Arthur Koestler photo
El Lissitsky photo
Michael Moorcock photo
Winston S. Churchill photo
John Dryden photo

“All human things are subject to decay,
And, when fate summons, monarchs must obey.”

John Dryden (1631–1700) English poet and playwright of the XVIIth century

Source: Mac Flecknoe (1682), l. 1–2.

Emily Dickinson photo
Alexandre Dumas photo

“Eh! sire, that is the fate of truth; she is a stern companion; she bristles all over with steel; she wounds those whom she attacks, and sometimes him who speaks her.”

Alexandre Dumas (1802–1870) French writer and dramatist, father of the homonym writer and dramatist

Le Vicomte de Bragelonne ou Dix ans plus (The Vicomte de Bragelonne) (1847)

Henri of Luxembourg photo

“Each of us, within the limits of our resources, is set to be an actor, in having a lead role in one's own life, but above all by committing to others…a profound truth [is] that everyone has a role to play in society beyond their own fate.”

Henri of Luxembourg (1955) Grand Duke (head of state) of the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg

Jidderee vun eis ass, an der Mooss vun sengen Mëttelen, dozou opgeruff selwer Akteur ze sinn, an dem e säi Liewen an d’Hand hëlt, mee och an dem en sech fir déi aner engagéiert...eng profund Wourecht, an zwar dass Jiddereen an der Gesellschaft eng Roll ze spillen huet, déi säin eegent Schicksal iwwertrëfft.
Christmas message http://www.monarchie.lu/fr/actualites/discours/2014/12/discours-noel-lu/index.html (25 December 2014)
Society

Robert D. Kaplan photo
David Lloyd George photo

“At eleven o’clock this morning came to an end the cruellest and most terrible War that has ever scourged mankind. I hope we may say that thus, this fateful morning, came to an end all wars.”

David Lloyd George (1863–1945) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Speech http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1918/nov/11/time-limit-for-reply in the House of Commons (11 November 1918)
Prime Minister