Quotes About Fate

Imagine what might have happened had you not missed your train

Given that it was not predictable, you are not to blame.

Ainoa asia, jota onnetar ei säätele, on käyttäytymiseni.

it is contagion that determines the fate of a theory in social science, not its validity.

gently remind him of the fate of the monk whom Ivan the Terrible put to death for delivering uninvited (and moralizing) advice.

that which came with the help of luck could be taken away by luck (and often rapidly and unexpectedly at that). The flipside, which deserves to be considered as well (in fact it is even more of our concern), is that things that come with little help from luck are more resistant to randomness.

Another way to see the beastly aspect of schedules and rigid projections is to think in limit situations. Would you like to know with great precision the date of your death? Would you like to know who committed the crime before the beginning of the movie? Actually, wouldn't it be better if the length of movies were kept a secret?

But no problem; the people you meet when riding high are also those you meet when riding low, and I saw the fellow getting some (more subtle) abuse from the same accountant before he got fired, as he eventually ran out of luck. You are free—but only as free as your last trade. As we saw with Ahiqar's wild ass, freedom is never free.

A person can get slightly ahead for entirely random reasons;

and I wondered whether he might have stayed alive had he gone to New York instead.

Fanfares of trumpets usually announced only small, futile things, it was a way fate had of teasing people. You felt a great exaltation and heard a loud fanfare of trumpets in the sky. But the serious things of life, on the contrary, took you by surprise, they spurted up all of a sudden like water.

And no one knew what was in store for the dead, he said, perhaps nothing at all but perhaps, on the other hand, there was something, probably a great boredom, he said, a deathly boredom.

And then sometimes it comes over me and I wonder why it happened to us. We're plain as salt, us Tucks. We don't deserve no blessings—if it is a blessing. And, likewise, I don't see how we deserve to be cursed, if it's a curse. Still—there's no use trying to figure why things fall the way they do. Things just are, and fussing don't bring changes.

Mae Tuck must never go to the gallows. Whatever happened to the man in the yellow suit, Mae Tuck must not be hanged. Because if all they had said was true, then Mae, even if she were the cruelest of murderers and deserved to be put to death--Mae Tuck would not be able to die.

Still—there's no use trying to figure why things fall the way they do. Things just are, and fussing don't bring changes.

If you were given a book with the story of your life, would you read the end?

But, all this while, I was giving myself very unnecessary alarm. Providence had mediated better things for me than I could possibly imagine for myself.

She had wandered, without rule or guidance, in a moral wilderness, as vast, as intricate, and shadowy as the untamed forest, amid the gloom of which they were now holding a colloquy that was to decide their fate.

Then might I exemplify how an influence beyond our control lays its strong hand on every deed which we do, and weaves its consequences into an iron tissue of necessity. (Wakefield)

Or this:—that the whole universe, her own sex and yours, and Providence, or Destiny, to boot, make common cause against the woman who swerves one hair's breadth out of the beaten track.

But what shall we say, when an individual discovers a revelation addressed to himself alone, on the same vast sheet of record. In such a case, it could only be the symptom of a highly disordered mental state, when a man, rendered morbidly self-contemplative by long, intense, and secret pain, had extended his egotism over the whole expanse of nature, until the firmament itself should appear no more than a fitting page for his soul's history and fate.

as a mark of gratitude for his previous patronage, and a slight super-added morsel after breakfast, put likewise into his hand a whale! The great fish, reversing his experience with the prophet of Nineveh, immediately began his progress down the same red pathway of fate whiter so varied a caravan had preceded him.

the force of doom, which almost invariably compels human beings to linger around and haunt, ghost-like, the spot where some great and marked event has given the colour to their lifetime; and, still the more irresistibly, the darker the tinge that saddens it.

Una strana fatalità sembra costringere ogni essere umano ad aggirarsi, simile ad un fantasma, nei luoghi dove qualche grave avvenimento ha lasciato un profondo solco nella vita di lui; e codesta fatalità è tanto più inesorabile, quanto più quel solco sia di tristezza e di dolore.