Quotes About Fate

Devotion is the realization that wealth, education and power are God given gifts and not the endowments of fate.

Power just makes you reject destiny and devour your fate.

A physician can sometimes parry the scythe of death, but has no power over the sand in the hourglass.

A man's free will cannot cure him even of the toothache, or a sore finger; and yet he madly thinks it is in its power to cure his soul.

It lies not in our power to love or hate, for will in us is overruled by fate.

There is none of you but will hang me, I know, whenever you can clinch me within your power.

Riches and power are but gifts of blind fate, whereas goodness is the result of one's own merits.

Fortunate is he whose mind has the power to probe the causes of things and trample underfoot all terrors and inexorable fate.

Responsibility without power, the fate of the secretary through the ages.

All the best sands of my life are somehow getting into the wrong end of the hourglass. If I could only reverse it! Were it in my power to do sowould I?

Live not as though there were a thousand years ahead of you. Fate is at your elbow; make yourself good while life and power are still yours.

It is a hard but good law of fate, that as every evil, so every excessive power, wears itself out.

But the power of destiny is something awesome; neither wealth, nor Ares, nor a tower, nor dark-hulled ships might escape it.

Of this alone, even god is deprived, the power of making things that are past never to have been.

remarked to Mom how all the books we were reading then shared not just length but a certain theme: fate and the effects of the choices people make. "I think most good books share that theme," Mom said.

We found ourselves discussing the three kinds of fateful choices that exist in the two books: the ones characters make knowing that they can never be undone; the ones they make thinking they can but learn they can't; and the ones they make thinking they can't and only later come to understand, when it's too late, when "nothing can be undone," that they could have.

If men could not trust in the divine agency of the gods, and if human perfection were no longer possible within the polis, the only conclusion seemed to be that man's fate was solely a personal matter.

There are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before.

But any story about human beings is bound to have an end, like this story about us, a pair of ingenuous people who fell in love and went journeying together through life, blundering by good luck in the right directions so that we came to a lasting wholeness and joy in each other. It has happened before; it will happen again; it happened to us. We belonged together.

Waarom zal ik mij moreel gedragen, als ik toch in ieder geval de doodstraf krijg? Iedereen krijgt nou eenmaal de doodstraf en iedereen weet het.

Wij zijn als regendruppels die, tegen het raam van een voortrazende trein geblazen, met kleine rukjes verder kruipen; niemand kan precies voorspellen welke weg ze zullen volgen, al komen ze op den duur wel allemaal aan de rand van het glas terecht, om te vervloeien en te verdwijnen.

all we have is "on loan" from Fortune, which can reclaim it without our permission—indeed, without even advance notice. Thus,

Some things are up to us and some are not up to us.

According to Epictetus, we should keep firmly in mind that we are merely actors in a play written by someone else—more precisely, the Fates. We cannot choose our role in this play, but regardless of the role we are assigned, we must play it to the best of our ability.