Quotes About Destiny

As to the crook in your lot, God has made it; and it must continue while He will have it so. Should you ply your utmost force to even it, or make it straight, your attempt will be vain: it will not change for all you can do. Only He who made it can mend it, or make it straight.

It seemed that we were condemned to be who we were, which was not a particularly good prospect.

There is only one story.

Each one of us will die, naked and alone, on some battlefield not of our own choosing.

Tis because we be on a blighted star, and not a sound one, isn't it Tess?

What is it, Angel? she said, starting up. Have they come for me? Yes, dearest, he said. They have come. It is as it should be, she murmured. Angel, I am almost glad—yes, glad! This happiness could not have lasted. It was too much. I have had enough; and now I shall not live for you to despise me! She stood up, shook herself, and went forward, neither of the men having moved. I am ready, she said quietly.

Indifference to fate which, though it often makes a villain of a man, is the basis of his sublimity when it does not.

In the ill-judged execution of the well-judged plan of things the call seldom produces the comer, the man to love rarely coincides with the hour for loving. Nature does not often say 'See!' to her poor creature at a time when seeing can lead to happy doing; or reply 'Here!' to a body's cry of 'Where?' till the hide-and-seek has become an irksome outworn game.

In the ill-judged execution of the well-judged plan of things the call seldom produces the comer, the man to love rarely coincides with the hour for loving

How I have tried and tried to be a splendid woman, and how destiny has been against me! ...I do not deserve my lot! ...O, the cruelty of putting me into this ill-conceived world! I was capable of much; but I have been injured and blighted and crushed by things beyond my control! O, how hard it is of Heaven to devise such tortures for me, who have done no harm to heaven at all!

Such miserable creatures of circumstance are we all!

Justice" was done, and the President of the Immortals (in Aeschylean phrase) had ended his sport with Tess.

I was born bad, and I have lived bad, and I shall die bad in all probability.

How unexpected [are] the attacks of destiny!

Why should we faint, and fear to live alone, Since all alone, so Heaven has will'd, we die?

the man to love rarely coincides with the hour for loving.

Tis because we be on a blighted star, and not a sound one, isn't it, Tess? murmured Abraham through his tears.

Tess and Clare unconsciously studied each other, ever balanced on the edge of a passion, yet apparently keeping out of it. All the while they were converging, under an irresistible law, as surely as two streams in one vale.

Like a certain philosopher I would, upon my soul, have all young men from eighteen to twenty-five kept under barrels; seeing how often, in the lack of some such sequestering process, the woman sits down before each as his destiny, and too frequently enervates his purpose, till he abandons the most promising course ever conceived!

Tess was carried along the wings of the hours

Your next world is your next world, and not to be squandered offhand.

Gabriel's malignant star was assuredly setting fast.

Enough that in the present case, as in millions, it was not the two halves of a perfect whole that confronted each other at the perfect moment; a missing counterpart wandered independently about the earth waiting in crass obtuseness till the late time came.

All the while they were converging, under an irresistible law, as surely as two streams in one vale