Quotes About Destiny

we don't get to choose our own hearts. We can't make ourselves want what's good for us or what's good for other people. We don't get to choose the people we are.

What if our badness and mistakes are the very thing that set our fate and bring us round to good? What if, for some of us, we can't get there any other

Everyone basically has one aria to sing over their entire life.

Does such a thing as "the fatal flaw," that showy dark crack running down the middle of a life, exist outside literature

la vita è breve. Che il destino è crudele ma forse non casuale. Che la Natura (intesa come Morte) vince sempre, ma questo non significa che dobbiamo inchinarci e prostrarci al suo cospetto. Che forse anche se non siamo sempre contenti di essere qui, è nostro compito immergerci comunque: entrarci, attraversare questa fogna, con gli occhi e il cuore ben aperti.

Chance had placed him in the catapult and now it was up to the vagaries of history to cut the catapult's rope.

No cosmic dramatist could possibly devise a better entrance for a new President—or a new Dictator, or a new Messiah—than that accorded to Franklin Roosevelt," White House aide Robert Sherwood observed, aligning himself with those who believe that a leader is summoned to the fore by the needs of the time.

I would not have been president had it not been for my experience in North Dakota.

The young often have moments of clear thinking, which as they grow older become fewer, and muddied. He had kept alive in some part of him a knowledge that he was "destined" to do something or other. He felt this as pure and unsullied, but—more often and more deeply as he grew older—"impractical".

Now these delightful infants are born haphazardly of any mating, any parents, treated well or ill as chance dictates, dying as easily as they are born, and dying anyway so soon after they are born - and yet in each child, every one, has all the potentiality, has it still, and completely, to leap from his low half-animal state to true humanity. Each one of them with this potential, and yet so few can be reached, to make the leap.

I'm not going to be like my mother. You're maniacs. You're mad. "Yes," said Kate. "I know it. And so you won't be. The best of luck to you. And what are you going to be instead?

Twenty years after we had left so fierce and proud, we were all right back where we had started, yoked to each other and the same old drama.

The crossroads may not be of your own seeking, but at least the road you choose will be your own.

I wish to make my fortune with you.' 'Well, you can forget about that, for a start,' said Francis Crawford. 'And if your place in Paradise has been written, then for God's sake hang on to it. Because we're going in the opposite direction.

Philippa drew a deep breath, and found relief in expelling it. 'Do you think,' she said carefully, 'that someone is going to be goaded into doing something soon?' There was a long pause. 'I think,' said Jerott at length, equally carefully, 'that someone is going to the court of Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent, and someone else is going to Flaw Valleys, England, to Mother.' Which summed it up, Philippa supposed, with regret.

We all die,' said Nostradamus. 'The man you love. The man who loves you. The man you married. But because of you there will be something, I promise you, by which men will know Francis Crawford has been.

Considering Lymond, flat now on the bed in wordless communion with the ceiling, Richard spoke. My dear, you are only a boy. You have all your life still before you. On the tortoise-shell bed, his brother did not move. But there was no irony for once in his voice when he answered. Oh, yes, I know. The popular question is, For what?

Our powder and arrows are going to run out on us some time. And so are our food and water and joie de vivre and good books and everything. Why not walk out now and get made into somebody's favourite slave?

I have lost you before I have found you.

Like King Lewis of Hungary, who was immaturely born, came of age too soon and was immaturely married, my age is out of joint with my phenomenal destiny.

And because death was a friend, the one man who was made to receive, like a tuning-fork, the whispering omens of fate did not recognize it, until too late.

I prefer a society which accepts that I have no choice, and does not pretend that I have. I prefer a God who does what he wills, and rules as he desires, and enjoins on me not to prevent anything against its destiny.

Where there had been peace, now there was endurance. "He will awake," said Nostradamus. "You took a great risk, but he will awake, if that is what you want for him.

It was a short journey, and more fateful than any one of them knew. A journey inevitable from the day Francis Crawford was born, and set firm in his stars where already old eyes had distinguished it and younger eyes, also far-seeing, had chosen to ignore and defy it.