Quotes about destiny
page 6

Aldous Huxley photo
Ronald David Laing photo

“Interviewer: In other words you were born with your destiny tied to cows. So, of course you must love cows?”

Hiromu Arakawa (1973) award winning Japanese manga artist

Interview with mobuta.com (2004)

Margaret Fuller photo

“To me, our destinies seem flower and fruit
Born of an ever-generating root…”

Margaret Fuller (1810–1850) American feminist, poet, author, and activist

Life Without and Life Within (1859), The One In All

Donald J. Trump photo
Daniel Webster photo
Andrea Pirlo photo
Frances Willard photo

“If I were black and young, no steamer could revolve its wheels fast enough to convey me to the dark continent. I should go where my color was the correct thing, and leave these pale faces to work out their own destiny.”

Frances Willard (1839–1898) American suffragist

October 1890 interview "The Race Problem: Frances Willard on the Political Puzzle of the South", per 2015 book Beyond the Pale: White Women, Racism, and History https://books.google.ca/books?id=SKXjDAAAQBAJ&pg=PA200

Carl Friedrich Gauss photo
Jane Addams photo
Natalie Merchant photo
Slavoj Žižek photo
Tenzin Gyatso photo

“According to Buddhism, individuals are masters of their own destiny. And all living beings are believed to possess the nature of the Primordial Buddha Samantabhadra, the potential or seed of enlightenment, within them. So our future is in our own hands. What greater free will do we need?”

Tenzin Gyatso (1935) spiritual leader of Tibet

Answering the question: "Do sentient beings have free will?" in Dzogchen : The Heart Essence of the Great Perfection (2001), p. 168, ISBN 155939157X.

William Wordsworth photo

“And stepping westward seemed to be
A kind of heavenly destiny.”

William Wordsworth (1770–1850) English Romantic poet

Stepping Westward, st. 2.
Memorials of a Tour in Scotland (1803)

“Where’er she lie,
Locked up from mortal eye,
In shady leaves of destiny.”

Richard Crashaw (1612–1649) British writer

Wishes for the Supposed Mistress

Charles Krauthammer photo
Morarji Desai photo
David Baddiel photo
David Thomas (born 1813) photo

“Don't let your history interfere with your destiny.”

Source: Life, the Truth, and Being Free (2010), p. 108

Franklin D. Roosevelt photo
Martin Luther King, Jr. photo
Ludovico Ariosto photo

“[As] a man, whether he stay or flee,
Cannot evade his hour of destiny.”

Come l'uom né per star né per fuggire,
Al suo fisso destin può contradire.
Canto XXVII, stanza 26 (tr. B. Reynolds)
Orlando Furioso (1532)

Charles A. Beard photo
Fred Astaire photo

“Of all the actors and actresses I've ever worked with, the hardest worker is Fred Astaire. He behaved like he was a young man whose whole destiny depended on being successful in his first film. He rehearses between takes, after takes - there's no limit to his professionalism.”

Fred Astaire (1899–1987) American dancer, singer, actor, choreographer and television presenter

Rouben Mamoulian in Lecture and discussion at University of Southern California, December 7, 1975. Tape recording, Special Collections, University of Southern California. (M).

Ko Wen-je photo
Sarah Palin photo

“This is Reagan country, and perhaps it was destiny that the man who went to California's Eureka College would become so woven within and interlinked to the Golden State.”

Sarah Palin (1964) American politician

Speaking at a fundraiser at California State University - Stanislaus on June 25, 2010, she mistakenly assumed that Eureka College was in California, when it is, in fact, in Eureka, Illinois. https://archive.is/20130628212450/www.chicagotribune.com/news/opinion/ct-talk-sarah-palin-eureka-college-0720100630,0,4918561.story
2010

John Gray photo
Gottfried Feder photo
José Ortega Y Gasset photo
Eugene Rotberg photo
Arthur C. Clarke photo

“He had discharged his destiny; now, perhaps, he could begin to live.”

Source: The City and the Stars (1956), Chapter 25 (p. 187)

Albert Einstein photo
Ilana Mercer photo

“Liberals retain a totemic attachment to the Freudian idea that traumatic toilet training is destiny.”

Ilana Mercer South African writer

"Coddling Killers," http://spectator.org/archives/2004/12/29/coddling-killers The American Spectator, December 29, 2004.
2000s

Pierre Trudeau photo

“I walked until midnight in the storm, then I went home and took a sauna for an hour and a half. It was all clear. I listened to my heart and saw if there were any signs of my destiny in the sky, and there were none — there were just snowflakes.”

Pierre Trudeau (1919–2000) 15th Prime Minister of Canada

Recounting a "walk in the snow" at a news conference announcing his resignation (29 February 1984)[citation needed]

Francesco Petrarca photo

“And so on earth
our destiny is with us from our birth.”

Cosí nel mondo
sua ventura à ciascun dal dí che nasce.
Canzone 303, st. 4 (tr. Mark Musa)
Il Canzoniere (c. 1351–1353), To Laura in Death

Luis Miguel photo

“I feel that destiny is a mixture of preparation and luck. You can be very lucky, but it is useless if you're not prepared. You can be prepared, but it is useless if you're not lucky.”

Luis Miguel (1970) Puerto Rican singer; music producer

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aipyRne6dso
Interview in Mexico, 1995

Huston Smith photo
Corneliu Zelea Codreanu photo

“It is a new form of leadership of states, never encountered yet. I don't know what designation it will be given, but it is a new form. I think that it is based on this state of mind, this state of high national consciousness which, sooner or later, spreads to the periphery of the national organism. It is a state of inner light. What previously slept in the souls of the people, as racial instinct, is in these moments reflected in their consciousness, creating a state of unanimous illumination, as found only in great religious experiences. This state could be rightly called a state of national oecumenicity. A people as a whole reach self-consciousness, consciousness of its meaning and its destiny in the world. In history, we have met in peoples nothing else than sparks, whereas, from this point of view, we have today permanent national phenomena. In this case, the leader is no longer a 'boss' who 'does what he wants', who rules according to 'his own good pleasure': he is the expression of this invisible state of mind, the symbol of this state of consciousness. He does not do what he wants, he does what he has to do. And he is guided, not by individual interests, nor by collective ones, but instead by the interests of the eternal nation, to the consciousness of which the people have attained. In the framework of these interests and only in their framework, personal interests as well as collective ones find the highest degree of normal satisfaction.”

Corneliu Zelea Codreanu (1899–1938) Romanian politician

On the form of government he plans on creating.
For My Legionaries: The Iron Guard (1936), Politics

Joseph Heller photo

“If character is destiny, the good are damned.”

God Knows (1984)

Prem Rawat photo
Frederick Douglass photo

“The story of our inferiority is an old dodge, as I have said; for wherever men oppress their fellows, wherever they enslave them, they will endeavor to find the needed apology for such enslavement and oppression in the character of the people oppressed and enslaved. When we wanted, a few years ago, a slice of Mexico, it was hinted that the Mexicans were an inferior race, that the old Castilian blood had become so weak that it would scarcely run down hill, and that Mexico needed the long, strong and beneficent arm of the Anglo-Saxon care extended over it. We said that it was necessary to its salvation, and a part of the “manifest destiny” of this Republic, to extend our arm over that dilapidated government. So, too, when Russia wanted to take possession of a part of the Ottoman Empire, the Turks were “an inferior race.” So, too, when England wants to set the heel of her power more firmly in the quivering heart of old Ireland, the Celts are an “inferior race.” So, too, the Negro, when he is to be robbed of any right which is justly his, is an “inferior man.” It is said that we are ignorant; I admit it. But if we know enough to be hung, we know enough to vote. If the Negro knows enough to pay taxes to support the government, he knows enough to vote; taxation and representation should go together. If he knows enough to shoulder a musket and fight for the flag, fight for the government, he knows enough to vote. If he knows as much when he is sober as an Irishman knows when drunk, he knows enough to vote, on good American principles.”

Frederick Douglass (1818–1895) American social reformer, orator, writer and statesman

1860s, What the Black Man Wants (1865)

Gabrielle Roy photo
Pierre Corneille photo

“Death was to be my glory, but destiny has refused it.”

Ma mort était ma gloire, et le destin m'en prive.
Cornélie, act III, scene iv.
La Mort de Pompée (The Death of Pompey) (1642)

Frederick Douglass photo
Angela Merkel photo

“Climate change is an issue determining our destiny as mankind – it will determine the well-being of all of us.”

Angela Merkel (1954) Chancellor of Germany

Cited in: Damian Carrington, "Climate change will determine humanity's destiny, says Angela Merkel" https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/nov/15/climate-change-will-determine-humanitys-destiny-says-angela-merkel, The Guardian, 15 November 2017 (page visited on 15 November 2017).
2017

Frederick Douglass photo
Glen Cook photo

“A teacher?”
“Yes. He argued that we are the gods, that we create our own destiny. That what we are determines what will become of us. In a peasantlike vernacular, we all paint ourselves into corners from which here is no escape simply by being ourselves and interacting with other selves.”
“Interesting.”
“Well. Yes. There is god of sorts, Croaker. Do you know? Not a mover and shaker, though. Simply a negator. An ender of tales. He has a hunger that cannot be sated. The universe itself will slide down his maw.”
“Death?”
“I do not want to die, Croaker. All that I am shrieks against the unrighteousness of death. All that I am, was, and probably will be, is shaped by my passion to evade the end of me.” She laughed quietly, but there was a thread of hysteria there. She gestured, indicating the shadowed killing ground below. “I would have built a world in which I was safe. And the cornerstone of my citadel would have been death.”
The end of the dream was drawing close. I could not imagine a world without me in it, either. And the inner me was outraged. Is outraged. I have no trouble imagining someone becoming obsessed with escaping death.
“I understand.”

“Maybe. We’re all equals at the dark gate, no? The sands run for us all. Life is but a flicker shouting into the jaws of eternity. But it seems so damned unfair!”
Source: The White Rose (1985), Chapter 39, “A Guest at Charm” (p. 625)

Martin Luther King, Jr. photo
William McKinley photo

“Illiteracy must be banished from the land if we shall attain that high destiny as the foremost of the enlightened nations of the world which, under Providence, we ought to achieve.”

William McKinley (1843–1901) American politician, 25th president of the United States (in office from 1897 to 1901)

First Inaugural Address (March 4, 1897).
1890s

Paramahansa Yogananda photo

“Nor doomsday’s thunderous roar,
Dismantling earth and stars —
The cosmic beauties all to mar —
Not Nature’s murderous mutiny,
Nor man’s exploding destiny
Can touch me here.”

Paramahansa Yogananda (1893–1952) Yogi, a guru of Kriya Yoga and founder of Self-Realization Fellowship

Songs of the Soul by Paramahansa Yogananda, Quotes drawn from the poem "Nature’s Nature"

David Lloyd George photo

“Do these things for the sake of your country during the war. Do them for the sake of your country after the war. When the smoke of this great conflict has been dissolved in the atmosphere we breathe there will reappear a new Britain. It will be the old country still, but it will be a new country. Its commerce will be new, its trade will be new, its industries will be new. There will be new conditions of life and of toil, for capital and for labour alike, and there will be new relations between both of them and for ever. (Cheers.) But there will be new ideas, there will be a new outlook, there will be a new character in the land. The men and women of this country will be burnt into fine building material for the new Britain in the fiery kilns of the war. It will not merely be the millions of men who, please God! will come back from the battlefield to enjoy the victory which they have won by their bravery—a finer foundation I would not want for the new country, but it will not be merely that—the Britain that is to be will depend also upon what will be done now by the many more millions who remain at home. There are rare epochs in the history of the world when in a few raging years the character, the destiny, of the whole race is determined for unknown ages. This is one. The winter wheat is being sown. It is better, it is surer, it is more bountiful in its harvest than when it is sown in the soft spring time. There are many storms to pass through, there are many frosts to endure, before the land brings forth its green promise. But let us not be weary in well-doing, for in due season we shall reap if we faint not.”

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

Loud cheers.
Speech in his constituency of Carnavon Boroughs (3 February 1917), quoted in The Times (5 February 1917), p. 12
Prime Minister

Michael Moorcock photo
Michelle Obama photo

“The untransacted destiny of the American people is to subdue the continent — to rush over this vast field to the Pacific Ocean — to animate the many hundred millions of its people, and to cheer them upward — to set the principle of self-government at work — to agitate these herculean masses — to establish a new order in human affairs — to set free the enslaved — to regenerate superannuated nations — to change darkness into light — to stir up the sleep of a hundred centuries — to teach old nations a new civilization — to confirm the destiny of the human race — to carry the career of mankind to its culminating point — to cause stagnant people to be re-born — to perfect science — to emblazon history with the conquest of peace — to shed a new and resplendent glory upon mankind — to unite the world in one social family — to dissolve the spell of tyranny and exalt charity — to absolve the curse that weighs down humanity, and to shed blessings round the world!
Divine task! immortal mission! Let us tread fast and joyfully the open trail before us! Let every American heart open wide for patriotism to glow undimmed, and confide with religious faith in the sublime and prodigious destiny of his well-loved country.”

Address to the U.S. Senate (2 March 1846); quoted in Mission of the North American People, Geographical, Social, and Political (1873), by William Gilpin, p. 124.

Emma Orczy photo
William McKinley photo

“We need Hawaii just as much and a good deal more than we did California. It is manifest destiny.”

William McKinley (1843–1901) American politician, 25th president of the United States (in office from 1897 to 1901)

Remark to personal secretary George Cortelyou (1898).
1890s

Marguerite Yourcenar photo

“A touch of madness is, I think, almost always necessary for constructing a destiny.”

Marguerite Yourcenar (1903–1987) French writer

Je crois qu'il faut presque toujours un coup de folie pour bâtir un destin.
Les yeux ouverts: entretiens avec Matthieu Galey [With Open Eyes: Conversations With Matthieu Galey] (1980)

Epifanio de los Santos photo
George Bernard Shaw photo
Miguel de Unamuno photo
Bob Dylan photo

“America was changing. I had a feeling of destiny and I was riding the changes… My consciousness was beginning to change, too, change and stretch.”

Bob Dylan (1941) American singer-songwriter, musician, author, and artist

Source: Chronicles: Vol. One (2004), p. 73

Ben Carson photo

“We create our own destiny by the way we do things. We have to take advantage of opportunities and be responsible for our choices.”

Ben Carson (1951) 17th and current United States Secretary of Housing and Urban Development; American neurosurgeon

Source: Gifted Hands: The Ben Carson Story (1990), p. 63

Ursula K. Le Guin photo
Rod Serling photo
Anne Rice photo
Viswanathan Anand photo
François de Malherbe photo

“But she bloomed on earth, where the most beautiful things have the saddest destiny;
And Rose, she lived as live the roses, for the space of a morning.”

François de Malherbe (1555–1628) (1555–1628) French poet, critic, and translator

Mais elle était du monde, où les plus belles choses
Ont le pire destin;
Et Rose, elle a vécu ce que vivent les roses,
L'espace d'un matin.
Letter of condolence to M. Du Perrier on the loss of his daughter, as quoted in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), p. 680

Paulo Coelho photo
Corneliu Zelea Codreanu photo

“Are we going to be the weak and cowardly generation that will relinquish, under threats, the Rumanian destiny and renounce our national mission?”

Corneliu Zelea Codreanu (1899–1938) Romanian politician

For My Legionaries: The Iron Guard (1936), Nation and Culture

Albert Pike photo
Gaston Bachelard photo
Michael Moorcock photo

“Destiny was apparently a word describing an individual’s desperate need for certainty.”

Source: The City in the Autumn Stars (1986), Chapter 12 (p. 349)

Gabrielle Roy photo
Winston S. Churchill photo
Corneliu Zelea Codreanu photo
Robert G. Ingersoll photo
J. William Fulbright photo
Ludwig Boltzmann photo

“O! immodest mortal! Your destiny is the joy of watching the evershifting battle!”

Ludwig Boltzmann (1844–1906) Austrian physicist

S. Rajasekar, N.Athavan, " Ludwig Edward Boltzmann http://arxiv.org/abs/physics/0609047" (7 September 2006), arXiv:physics/0609047v1 [physics.hist-ph]
Attributed

Anthony Burgess photo

“We," he said, not without complacency, "are different. We attest the divine paradox. We are barren only to be fertile. We proclaim the primary reality of the world of the spirit which has an infinitude of mansions for an infinitude of human souls. And you too are different. Your destiny is of the rarest kind. You will live to proclaim the love of Christ for man and man for Christ in a figure of earthly love." Preacher's rhetoric; it would have been better in Italian, which thrives on melodious meaninglessness.
I said, with the same weariness as before, "My destiny is to live in a state of desire both church and state condemn and to grow sourly rich in the purveying of a debased commodity. I've just finished a novel which, when I'd read it through in typescript, made me feel sick to my stomach. And yet it's what people want -- the evocation of a past golden time when there was no Mussolini or Hitler or Franco, when gods were paid for with sovereigns, Elgar's Symphony Number One in A flat trumpeted noblimente a massive hope in the future, and the romantic love of a shopgirl and a younger son of the aristocracy portended a healthful inflection but not destruction of the inherited social pattern. Comic servants and imperious duchesses. Hansom cabs and racing at Ascot. Fascists and democrats alike will love it. My destiny is to create a kind of underliterature that lacks all whiff of the subversive.”

Anthony Burgess (1917–1993) English writer

"Don't," Carlo said, "underestimate yourself."
Fiction, Earthly Powers (1980)

Eric Foner photo
Albert Einstein photo

“No fairer destiny could be allotted to any physical theory, than that it should of itself point out the way to the introduction of a more comprehensive theory, in which it lives on as a limiting case.”

Es ist das schönste Los einer physikalischen Theorie, wenn sie selbst zur Aufstellung einer umfassenden Theorie den Weg weist, in welcher sie als Grenzfall weiterlebt.
Über die spezielle und die allgemeine Relativitätstheorie (1920) Tr. Robert W. Lawson, Relativity: The Special and General Theory (1920) pp. 90-91.
1920s

Warren G. Harding photo
Victor Davis Hanson photo

“[A] France or a Belgium is not quite a sovereign nation any more, and thus does not have complete control over its national destiny or foreign relations.”

Victor Davis Hanson (1953) American military historian, essayist, university professor

2010s, Europe at the Edge of the Abyss (2016)

Madonna photo
Antonio Gramsci photo
D. S. Bradford photo

“When the rains have fallen down
We can live our lives underground
No recollection of before
We'll make our own history
Fulfill our destiny
For sure, we can save humanity”

D. S. Bradford (1982) musician

A Call To The Stars II: A Home In The Sky https://www.musixmatch.com/lyrics/D-S-Bradford/A-Call-to-the-Stars-Ii-A-Home-in-the-Sky, verse 1
A Call To The Stars II: A Home In The Sky (2016)

Aldo Capitini photo