Quotes About Fate

An American Tragedy.

Life is made for the strong. There is no mercy in it for the weak– none...Such is the tragedy of desire.

I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow. I feel my fate in what I cannot fear. I learn by going where I have to go.

Why must we love where the lightning strikes, and not where we choose?

The best of all things for earthly men is not to be born and not to see the beams of the bright sun; but if born, then as quickly as possible to pass the gates of Hades, and to lie deep buried.

It was strange. ... If she'd never gone to the Amazon, never met Ash, she would most likely have been perfectly content with Todd. She wouldn't have understood those fleeting flashes of emptiness that come upon a per¬son from time to time. Now she knew what they were: the yearning for what could have been, for the road never taken.

This generation of Americans has a rendezvous with destiny.

Man proposes, but God disposes.

Homo proponit, sed Deus disponit

The resolve of the just depends upon the grace of God, not on their own wisdom; in Him they trust, whatever they undertake. For man proposes, but God disposes; it is not for man to choose his lot.

To every man upon this earth Death cometh soon or late. And how can man die better Than facing fearful odds, For the ashes of his fathers, And the temples of his gods.

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 so, would I?

A glance, a word -- and joy or pain befalls.... How slight the links are in the chain that binds us to our destiny!

O Liberty, white Goddess! is it well to leave the gates unguarded? On thy breast fold Sorrow's children, soothe the hurts of Fate, lift the down-trodden, but with hand of steel stay those who to thy sacred portals come to waste the gifts of Freedom.

Conway would give me no rest until I fought him. I felt it was ordained ages before our birth that we should meet on this planet and fight.

We cannot hope to live so long in our names, as some have done in their persons, one face of Janus holds no proportion unto the other. 'Tis too late to be ambitious. The great mutations of the world are acted, or time may be too short for our designes...We whose generations are ordained in this setting part of time, are providentially taken off from such imaginations.

There was, however, one drawback to his happy lot: he was not permitted to live beyond a certain period, and if, when he had attained the age of twenty-five years, he still survived, the priests drowned him in the sacred cistern and then buried him in the temple of Serapis.

The difference between being Achilles and almost being Achilles is the difference between living and dying.

In order to remain undead, I must steal the life force of someone whose fate matters less to me than my own.' I've always supposed that Wall Street traders utter essentially the same sentence.

Instead of saying that man is the creature of circumstance, it would be nearer the mark to say that man is the architect of circumstance.

The crash of the whole solar and stellar systems could only kill you once.

The tragedy of life is not so much what we suffer but what we miss.

This is the end of Prime Minister, Cardinal Archbishop Lomenie de Brienne. Flimsier mortal was seldom fated to do as weighty a mischief; to have a life as despicable-envied, an exit as frightful. Fired, as the phrase is, with ambition: blown, like a kindled rag, the sport of winds, not this way, not that way, but of all ways, straight towards such a powder-mine,—which he kindled! Let us pity the hapless Lomenie; and forgive him; and, as soon as possible, forget him.

As good Archbishop Loménie was wont to say: 'There are so many accidents; and it needs but one to save us.'—How many to destroy us?