Quotes about destiny
A collection of quotes on the topic of destiny, man, life, use.
Quotes about destiny
https://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/6422617.Liam_Payne
“Everything is predestined in life except the destiny of a man.”
“Choice, not chance, determines your destiny.”
Variant: Love is our true destiny. We do not find the meaning of life by ourselves alone we find it with another.
Source: Love and Living
Variant: A great human revolution in just a single individual will help achieve a change in the destiny of a nation and, further, can even enable a change in the destiny of all humankind.
Source: The Human Revolution
“It is not in the stars to hold our destiny but in ourselves.”
Man's Greatest Achievement (1908; 1930)
Context: According to an adopted theory, every ponderable atom is differentiated from a tenuous fluid, filling all space merely by spinning motion, as a whirl of water in a calm lake. By being set in movement this fluid, the ether, becomes gross matter. Its movement arrested, the primary substance reverts to its normal state. It appears, then, possible for man through harnessed energy of the medium and suitable agencies for starting and stopping ether whirls to cause matter to form and disappear. At his command, almost without effort on his part, old worlds would vanish and new ones would spring into being. He could alter the size of this planet, control its seasons, adjust its distance from the sun, guide it on its eternal journey along any path he might choose, through the depths of the universe. He could make planets collide and produce his suns and stars, his heat and light; he could originate life in all its infinite forms. To cause at will the birth and death of matter would be man's grandest deed, which would give him the mastery of physical creation, make him fulfill his ultimate destiny.
“Control Your Own Destiny or Someone Else Will”
On destiny - "The Shock Of Reality" http://allafrica.com/stories/200908240244.html All Africa (August 24 2009)
“I had a vision of the face of destiny.”
Source: Terre des Hommes (1939), Ch. I : The Craft
Context: I had a vision of the face of destiny.
Old bureaucrat, my comrade, it is not you who are to blame. No one ever helped you to escape. You, like a termite, built your peace by blocking up with cement every chink and cranny through which the light might pierce. You rolled yourself up into a ball in your genteel security, in routine, in the stifling conventions of provincial life, raising a modest rampart against the winds and the tides and the stars. You have chosen not to be perturbed by great problems, having trouble enough to forget your own fate as man. You are not the dweller upon an errant planet and do not ask yourself questions to which there are no answers. You are a petty bourgeois of Toulouse. Nobody grasped you by the shoulder while there was still time. Now the clay of which you were shaped has dried and hardened, and naught in you will ever awaken the sleeping musician, the poet, the astronomer that possibly inhabited you in the beginning.
The squall has ceased to be a cause of my complaint. The magic of the craft has opened for me a world in which I shall confront, within two hours, the black dragons and the crowned crests of a coma of blue lightnings, and when night has fallen I, delivered, shall read my course in the stars.
“Sorrowful and great is the artist's destiny.”
As quoted in Joseph Machlis, The Enjoyment of Music: An Introduction to Perceptive Listening (1963) Page 107.
“From someone who doesn't want to share your destiny, you should neither accept a cigarette”
Source: The Burning Brand: Diaries, 1935-1950
“A person often meets his destiny on the road he took to avoid it.”
Source: Fables
“Every man gotta right to decide his own destiny.”
Zimbabwe, from the album Survival (1979)
Song lyrics
“Workers of my country, I have faith in Chile and its destiny.”
Final address (1973)
Context: The people must defend themselves, but they must not sacrifice themselves. The people must not let themselves be destroyed or riddled with bullets, but they cannot be humiliated either.
Workers of my country, I have faith in Chile and its destiny. Other men will overcome this dark and bitter moment when treason seeks to prevail. Keep in mind that, much sooner than later, great avenues will again be opened, through which will pass the free man, to construct a better society.
Long live Chile! Long live the people! Long live the workers!
These are my last words, and I am certain that my sacrifice will not be in vain, I am certain that, at the very least, it will be a moral lesson that will punish felony, cowardice, and treason.
Alex Jones: The "Justin Biebler" Rant https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VDMB0KyhPN8, 21 February 2011.
2011
The text by Texe Marrs titled "All Hail the Jewish Master Race" was published before 2004 https://web.archive.org/web/20031217191553/http://texemarrs.com/112003/jewish_master_race.htm (allegedly 25 November 2003 https://web.archive.org/web/20031205052353/http://www.rense.com/general45/master.htm) and claimed "In his memoirs of his years in the White House, former President Jimmy Carter wrote that there could have been peace between the Arabs and the Israelis had it not been for the bigoted, Nazi-like racial views of Israeli's Prime Minister Menachem Begin. Begin, Carter recalled, believed the Jews were a Master Race, a holy people superior to Egyptians and Arabs." No source is provided regarding the Jimmy Carter claim.
Misattributed to Menachem Begin. Attributed in page 208 of Oil Crisis by Colin John Campbell in 2005 https://books.google.ca/books?id=VaGCbpbzjRwC&pg=PA208
Source: Life, the Truth, and Being Free (2010), p. 144
Babur writing about the battle against the Rajput Confederacy led by Maharana Sangram Singh of Mewar. In Babur-Nama, translated into English by A.S. Beveridge, New Delhi reprint, 1979, pp. 547-572.
The Problem of Peace (1954)
“I ask, on this bondless land
Who rules over man's destiny?”
Changsha (1925)
Context: Alone I stand in the autumn cold
On the tip of Orange Island,
Xiang flowing northward;
I see a thousand hills crimsoned through
By their serried woods deep-dyed,
And a hundred barges vying
Over crystal blue waters.
Eagles cleave the air,
Fish glide under the shallow water;
Under freezing skies a million creatures contend in freedom.
Brooding over this immensity,
I ask, on this bondless land
Who rules over man's destiny?
1960s, A Time for Choosing (1964)
Context: You and I have a rendezvous with destiny. We will preserve for our children this, the last best hope of man on Earth, or we will sentence them to take the last step into a thousand years of darkness. We will keep in mind and remember that Barry Goldwater has faith in us. He has faith that you and I have the ability and the dignity and the right to make our own decisions and determine our own destiny.
“The sword of destiny has two edges. You are one of them.”
Miecz przeznaczenia ma dwa ostrza. Jednym jesteś ty. (pl.)
The Sword Of Destiny (1993)
Source: The Sword Of Destiny
VI, 39
Meditations (c. 121–180 AD), Book VI
1960s, Letter from a Birmingham Jail (1963)
Variant: It really boils down to this: that all life is interrelated. We are all caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tired into a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one destiny, affects all indirectly.
Source: Letter from the Birmingham Jail
Context: Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. Never again can we afford to live with the narrow, provincial "outside agitator" idea. Anyone who lives inside the United States can never be considered an outsider anywhere within its bounds.
“When you are connected to your destiny, nothing and nothing can stop you.”
On how to stay focused - "The Secret Of My Peace In The Storm - TB Joshua" http://www.nigerianmonitor.com/the-secret-of-my-peace-in-the-storm-t-b-joshua/ Nigerian Monitor (October 27 2014)
Variant: “When you are connected to your destiny, nothing and nothing can stop you.”
Source: Reflections and Maxims (1746), p. 173.
The Guardian - October 11, 2006 http://www.danradcliffe.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=23&Itemid=28
"Marriage and Love" in Anarchism and Other Essays (1911)
Context: Love, the strongest and deepest element in all life, the harbinger of hope, of joy, of ecstasy; love, the defier of all laws, of all conventions; love, the freest, the most powerful moulder of human destiny; how can such an all-compelling force be synonymous with that poor little State and Church-begotten weed, marriage?
Free love? As if love is anything but free! Man has bought brains, but all the millions in the world have failed to buy love. Man has subdued bodies, but all the power on earth has been unable to subdue love. Man has conquered whole nations, but all his armies could not conquer love. Man has chained and fettered the spirit, but he has been utterly helpless before love. High on a throne, with all the splendor and pomp his gold can command, man is yet poor and desolate, if love passes him by. And if it stays, the poorest hovel is radiant with warmth, with life and color. Thus love has the magic power to make of a beggar a king. Yes, love is free; it can dwell in no other atmosphere.
As quoted in Sophia, Living and Loving: Her Own Story (1979) by A. E. Hotchner, p. 76.
Context: I was blessed with a sense of my own destiny. I have never sold myself short. I have never judged myself by other people’s standards. I have always expected a great deal of myself, and if I fail, I fail myself. So failure or reversal does not bring out resentment in me because I cannot blame others for any misfortune that befalls me.
“Everyone is master of his own destiny.”
Remark (23 June 1972), as quoted in Transitions to a Heart Centered World : Through the Kundalini Yoga and Meditations of Yogi Bhajan (1988) by Guru Rattana and Ann M. Maxwell, p. 107
Context: Everyone is master of his own destiny. Those who do not know how to be commanded do not know how to command. Temptation is the law of Maya (illusion). One who can withstand it knows the law of life: assess your 1) stamina 2) potential 3) basic flexibility, and know where your emotions are.
"In the Storm" in Le Socialiste http://www.marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/1904/05/01.htm as translated by Mitch Abidor (1 - 8 May 1904)
Context: The Russo-Japanese War now gives to all an awareness that even war and peace in Europe – its destiny – isn’t decided between the four walls of the European concert, but outside it, in the gigantic maelstrom of world and colonial politics.
And its in this that the real meaning of the current war resides for social-democracy, even if we set aside its immediate effect: the collapse of Russian absolutism. This war brings the gaze of the international proletariat back to the great political and economic connectedness of the world, and violently dissipates in our ranks the particularism, the pettiness of ideas that form in any period of political calm.
The war completely rends all the veils which the bourgeois world – this world of economic, political and social fetishism – constantly wraps us in.
The war destroys the appearance which leads us to believe in peaceful social evolution; in the omnipotence and the untouchability of bourgeois legality; in national exclusivism; in the stability of political conditions; in the conscious direction of politics by these “statesmen” or parties; in the significance capable of shaking up the world of the squabbles in bourgeois parliaments; in parliamentarism as the so-called center of social existence.
War unleashes – at the same time as the reactionary forces of the capitalist world – the generating forces of social revolution which ferment in its depths.
“Destiny is an absolutely definite and inexorable ruler.”
Source: The Confessions of Aleister Crowley (1929), Ch. 48.
Context: Destiny is an absolutely definite and inexorable ruler. Physical ability and moral determination count for nothing. It is impossible to perform the simplest act when the gods say "No." I have no idea how they bring pressure to bear on such occasions; I only know that it is irresistible. One may be wholeheartedly eager to do something which is as easy as falling off a log; and yet it is impossible.
“Give the Devil His Due”, 1st November 2014, https://youtube.com/XbiADYVORGE
Times of India in: p. 347.
About Zakir Hussain, Quest for Truth (1999)
Source: Election address; letter to the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, the Duke of Marlborough (8 March 1880), quoted in The Times (9 March 1880), p. 8
"America's Mission", speech delivered by the leader of the Democratic Party at the Washington Day banquet given by the Virginia Democratic Association at Washington, D.C., (22 February 1899), as published in The Book of Public Speaking (Vol. 2) http://www.forgottenbooks.com/readbook_text/The_Book_of_Public_Speaking_v2_1000538531/149
Speech in the House of Commons, February 27, 1945 "Crimea Conference" http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1945/feb/27/crimea-conference#column_1294; in The Second World War, Volume VI: Triumph and Tragedy (1954), Chapter XXIII – Yalta: Finale.
The Second World War (1939–1945)
Source: The Picture of Dorian Gray
Source: Manuscript Found in Accra
“It was my destiny to love and say goodbye.”
Source: Still Another Day
“What sort of philosophers are we, who know absolutely nothing of the origin and destiny of cats?”
Source: Thoreau Journal 9
Letter Three (23 April 1903)
Letters to a Young Poet (1934)
Context: No experience has been too unimportant, and the smallest event unfolds like a fate, and fate itself is like a wonderful, wide fabric in which every thread is guided by an infinitely tender hand and laid alongside another thread and is held and supported by a hundred others.
“The true hero fights and dies in the name of his destiny, and not in the name of a belief.”
Source: A Short History of Decay (1949)
“We make destiny with every turn, every choice.”
Source: Valley of Silence
Saying published anonymously in The Dayspring, Vol. 10 (1881) by the Unitarian Sunday-School Society, and quoted in Life and Labor (1887) by Smiles; this is most often attributed to George Dana Boardman, at least as early as 1884, but also sometimes attributed to William Makepeace Thackeray as early as 1891, probably because in in Life and Labor Smiles adds a quote by Thackeray right after this one, to Charles Reade in 1903, and to William James as early as 1906, because it appears in his Principles of Psychology (1890).
Misattributed
Source: Happy Homes and the Hearts That Make Them
“Don't forget your history nor your destiny”
“We ought to face our destiny with courage.”
Source: Think and Grow Rich: The Landmark Bestseller - Now Revised and Updated for the 21st Century
Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Variant: We have spiritual facts and their interpretations by which they are communicated to others, sruti or what is heard, and smṛti or what is remembered. Śaṅkara equates them with pratyakṣa or intuition and anumana or inference. It is the distinction between immediacy and thought. Intuitions abide, while interpretations change.
On the virtues of giving - "Hope Awakens For Forsaken" http://www.modernghana.com/news/237288/1/hope-awakens-for-forsaken.html Modern Ghana (September 9 2009)
1910s, The World Movement (1910)
And nothing can be quite so wonderful as the workings of a man's or a woman's destiny.
Source: Links in the Chain of Life (1947), Ch. 8
“Our destiny is frequently met in the very paths we take to avoid it.”
On rencontre sa destinée
Souvent par des chemins qu’on prend pour l’éviter.
Book VIII (1678–1679), fable 16 (The Horoscope)
Fables (1668–1679)
Variant: A person often meets his destiny on the road he took to avoid it.
“No cause has he to say his doom is harsh,
Who's made the master of his destiny.”
Gessler, Act III, sc. iii, as translated by Sir Thomas Martin
Wilhelm Tell (1803)
Source: Wings of Fire, p. 167.
As quoted in The Romance and Drama of the Rubber Industry (1936) by Harvey Samuel Firestone
1930s
Is There Meaning to Life? Jordan Peterson, Rebecca Goldstein, William Lane Craig, Debate at Wycliffe College at the University of Toronto
26 January 2018
YouTube
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pDDQOCXBrAw (9:07 into video)
Remarks by President Obama at the Global Entrepreneurship Summit at United Nations Compound in Nairobi, Kenya (July 25, 2015) https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2015/07/25/remarks-president-obama-global-entrepreneurship-summit
2015
Source: The War Hound and the World's Pain (1981), Chapter 18 (p. 166)
Letter 4: Theosophy of Julius
The Philosophical Letters
