Quotes About Destiny

The journey with a 1000 miles begins with one step.

He has not lived in vain who dies the day he is told about the Way

To see high merit and be unable to raise it to office, to raise it but not to give such promotion precedence, is just destiny.

He looked resigned, as though he knew that wretched door--to where? Home? Heaven? Peace?--would never open, and at the same time he seemed resolved, ready to do his bit even though he couldn't possibly know what sacrifices that would require. Had he been kept here, too--in a place he didn't belong, serving in a war in which he hadn't enlisted, to rescue sparrows and soldiers and shopgirls and Shakespeare? To tip the balance?

There are some things one is born to wear, and I had obviously been fated to wear this hat.

Sorry, he apologized. I didn't mean to inflict my rantings on you, even though we are destined to spend the rest of our lives together. I don't suppose you fave any thought to where we should be married while I was in with that lot of fools, did you? Yes, she said. I decided we shouldn't, that wartime attachments are a bad idea. Particularly if you're going to be lassoing flying bombs.

The past and the future are both part of a single continuum

Some people were born to the shape they would occupy all their lives. (Wait)

And if you find her poor, Ithaca has not deceived you. Wise as you have become, with so much experience, you must already have understood what these Ithacas mean.

Have Ithaka always in your mind. Your arrival there is what you are destined for. But don't in the least hurry the journey.

Every moment in your life is a turning and every one a choosing. Somewhere you made a choice. All followed to this. The accounting is scrupulous. The shape is drawn. No line can be erased. I had no belief in your ability to move a coin to your bidding. How could you? A person's path through the world seldom changes and even more seldom will it change abruptly. And the shape of your path was visible from the beginning.

If there's one thing on this planet you don't look like it's a bunch of good luck walkin around.

Only now is the child finally divested of all that he has been. His origins are become remote as is his destiny and not again in all the world's turning will there be terrains so wild and barbarous to try whether the stuff of creation may be shaped to man's will or whether his own heart is not another kind of clay.

If people knew the story of their lives, how many would then elect to live them?

No one can tell you what your life is goin to be, can they? No. It's never like what you expected. Quijada nodded. If people knew the story of their lives how many would then elect to live them?

His origins are become remote as is his destiny and not again in all the world's turnings will there be terrains so wild and barbarous to try whether the stuff of creation may be shaped to man's will or whether his own heart is not another kind of clay.

When I came into your life your life was over. It had a beginning, a middle, and an end. This is the end. You can say that things could have turned out differently. That they could have been some other way. But what does that mean? They are not some other way. They are this way.

Maybe it's like Mac says. Ever man winds up with the horse that suits him.

Doomed enterprises divide lives forever into the then and now

For me the world has always been more of a puppet show. But when one looks behind the curtain and traces the strings upward he finds they terminate in the hands of yet other puppets, themselves with their own strings which trace upward in turn, and so on. In my own life I saw these strings whose origins were endless enact the deaths of great men in violence and madness. Enact the ruin of a nation.

Notions of chance and fate are the preoccupation of men engaged in rash undertakings.

I got here the same way the coin did.

He said that whether a man's life was writ in a book someplace or whether it took its form day by day was one and the same for it had but one reality and that was the living of it.

I dont know what I ever done, she said. I truly dont. Chigurh nodded. Probably you do, he said. There's a reason for everything. She shook her head. How many times I've said them very words. I wont again.