Quotes About Destiny

It is not given to human beings—happily for them, for otherwise life would be intolerable—to foresee or to predict to any large extent the unfolding course of events.

No. Just stating facts. You and me? Inevitable.

The point is that if the love object is divine perfection, then one's own self is elevated by joining one's destiny to it.

luck is when the guy next to you gets hit with the arrow.

Human life may not be more than a meaningless interlude in a vicious drama of flesh and bones that we call evolution; that the Creator may not care any more for the destiny of man or the self-perpetuation of individual men than He seems to have cared for the dinosaurs or the Tasmanians.

This is the uniquely human need, what man everywhere is really all about—each person's need to be an object of primary value, a heroic contributor to world-life—the heroic contributor to the destiny of man.

Freud—like all of us—was caught in. To melt oneself trustingly into the father, or the father-substitute, or even the Great Father in the sky, is to abandon the causa-sui project, the attempt to be father of oneself. And if you abandon that you are diminished, your destiny is no longer your own; you are the eternal child making your way in the world of the elders.

The neurotic preoccupied with his symptom is led to believe that his central task is one of confrontation with his particular obsession or phobia. In a sense his neurosis allows him to take control of his destiny—to transform the whole of life's meaning into the simplified meaning emanating from his self-created world.

Nations as a natural, God-given way of classifying men, as an inherent though long-delayed political destiny, are a myth; nationalism, which sometimes takes pre-existing cultures and turns them into nations, sometimes invents them, and often obliterates pre-existing cultures: that is a reality, for better or worse, and in general an inescapable one. Those who are its historic agents know not what they do, but that is another matter.

Today is only one day in all the days that will ever be. But what will happen in all the other days that ever come can depend on what you do today. It's been that way all this year. It's been that way so many times. All of war is that way.

Luck is a thing that comes in many forms and who can recognize her?

Perhaps I should not have been a fisherman, he thought. But that was the thing that I was born for.

where a man feels at home, outside of where he's born, is where he's meant to go.

I never had to choose my subject- my subject rather chose me.

You will die like a dog for no good reason.

Don't think, old man, he said aloud. Sail on this course and take it when it comes.

Every true story ends in death.

Then they were together so that as the hand on the watch moved, unseen now, they knew that nothing could ever happen to the one that did not happen to the other, that no other thing could happen more than this; that this was all and always; this was what had been and now and whatever was to come. This, that they were not to have, they were having.

I guess you are all right. That was bad luck all right. Plenty bad luck.

Imagine if each day a man must try to kill the moon, he thought. The moon runs away. But imagine if a man each day should have to try to kill the sun? We were born lucky, he thought.

Stop chasing the wrong one. The right one won't run.

THE GAMBLER,THE NUN,& THE RADIO You'll be one. Everybody gets what they want. That's what they always tell me.

I don't know. I guess the cards we draw are those we get. You wouldn't like to re-deal would you, dealer? No. They only deal to you once and then you pick them up and play them. I can play them, if I draw any damn thing at all...

Don't think, old man,' he said aloud. 'Sail on this course and take it when it comes'. But I must think, he thought. Because it is all I have left.