Quotes About Fate

Hubris clobbered by Nemesis

My shorter definition of SF (is) Hubris clobbered by nemesis.

some trillions of years ago a sloppy, dirty giant flicked grease from his fingers. One of those gobs of grease is our universe on its way to the floor. Splat!

I believe we all have one true love, somewhere in this world I do.

Heroes are made by the paths they choose, not the powers they are graced with.

What will happen, will happen.

Krampus found me, forced me into servitude—me, the son of Odin, a slave to a low-cast demon. I did not care, did not feel. Hollow of heart and soul, I came to believe this to be my fate, my penance, that I had been spared to bear torment not just for my own vanity and arrogance, but for that of all my forebears.

Sooner or later you must move down an unknown road that leads beyond the range of the imagination, and the only certainty is that the trip has to be made.

Signal transduction science recognizes that the fate and behavior of an organism is directly linked to its perception of the environment.

Your blessings and your curses often come in the same package.

The crowd laughs at the parody. Weep, ladies, over your own fate, when you see the misery of imprisoned matter, of tortured matter which does not know what it is and why it is, nor where the gesture may lead that has been imposed on it forever. The crowd laughs. Do you understand the terrible sadism, the exhilarating, demiurgical cruelty of that laughter? Yet we should weep, ladies, at our own fate, when we see that misery of violated matter, against which a terrible wrong had been committed.

To this day I cannot understand how we became the conscious perpetrators of it. A strange fatality must have been driving us to it; for fate does not evade consciousness or will but engulfs them in its mechanism, so that we are able to accept, as in hypnotic trance, things that under normal circumstances would fill us with horror.

our fate has already been decided for us, the only thing we can do is stand strong and face our destiny head on

Sometimes the slightest things change the directions of our lives, the merest breath of a circumstance, a random moment that connects like a meteorite striking the earth. Lives have swiveled and changed direction on the strength of a chance remark.

It is deplorable, but not tragic, simply to be a victim of circumstance, for there is an important distinction between destiny and sheer victimization.

I now prophesy that I will dismember my dismemberer.

And as for small difficulties and worryings, prospects of sudden disaster, peril of life and limb; all these, and death itself, seem to him only sly, good-natured hits, and jolly punches in the side bestowed by the unseen and unaccountable old joker.

better is it to perish in that howling infinite, than be ingloriously dashed upon the lee

Command the murderous chalices...Drink ye harpooners! drink and swear, ye men that man the deathful whaleboat's bow--Death to Moby Dick!

Life folded Death; Death trellised Life; the grim god wived with youthful Life, and begat him curly-headed glories. Now

it was Queequeg's conceit, that if a man made up his mind to live, mere sickness could not kill him: nothing but a whale, or a gale, or some violent, ungovernable, unintelligent destroyer of that sort.

More terrible, to see how feline Fate will sometimes dally with a human soul, and by a nameless magic make it repulse a sane despair with a hope which is but mad. Unwittingly I imp this cat-like thing, sporting with the heart of him who reads; for if he feel not he reads in vain.

Herman Melville

The straight warp of necessity, not to be swerved from its ultimate course— its every alternating vibration, indeed, only tending to that; free will still free to ply her shuttle between given threads; and chance, though restrained in its play within the right lines of necessity, and sideways in its motions directed by free will, though thus prescribed to by both, chance by turns rules either, and has the last featuring blow at events.