Quotes About Fate

when it comes to the caprices and manipulations of the gods or God, whichever philosophy you may embrace, we are all of us merely pawns in their games, rather than players.

If I die before he does, or he before me, eventually we both end up in the same place. That's the odd thing about life. No one gets out alive.

I'm not supposed to be here, Xy.

There is hope in such a superstition; there is the illusion of control.

If one Egyptian tailor hadn't cheated on the threads of Joseph's mantle, Potiphar's wife would never have been able to tear it, present it as evidence to Potiphar that Joseph attacked her, gotten him thrown in prison, and let him be in a position to interpret Pharaoh's dream, win his confidence, advise him to store seven years of grain, and save his family, the seventy original Jews from whom Jesus came. We owe our salvation to a cheap Egyptian tailor.

Some say that to the gods we are like flies that boys idly swat on a summer day. Others say that not a feather from a sparrow falls to the ground without the will of the Heavenly Father." Those are the only two options.

The word 'risk' derives from the early Italian risicare, which means 'to dare'. In this sense, risk is a choice rather than a fate. The actions we dare to take, which depend on how free we are to make choices, are what the story of risk is all about. And that story helps define what it means to be a human being.

On the morning I was scheduled to die, a large barefoot man with a bushy red beard waddled past my house.

ON THE MORNING I was scheduled to die

Death. Toast. The story of our lives.

And die here at age fourteen?

Ultimately it is not the stock market nor even the companies themselves that determine an investor's fate. It is the investor.

What if it doesn't work out? Ah, but what if it does.

Indeed, throughout his life, Elvis had a knack of appearing normal, of being able to relate 104 THE INNER ELVIS to the common person. At the same time, his tendency to play the role of being normal when in fact he was in dire need of assistance would, later in life, dictate his fate. Elvis acted to fend off intervention by family, friends, and medical and mental health professionals who attempted repeatedly to help him survive his demons.

If children are fated to live out the unfulfilled dreams of their parents

No structure, even an artificial one, enjoys the process of entropy. It is the ultimate fate of everything, and everything resists it.

Mors certa, vita incerta

A human being without the proper empathy or feeling is the same as an android built so as to lack it, either by design or mistake. We mean, basically, someone who does not care about the fate which his fellow living creatures fall victim to; he stands detached, a spectator, acting out by his indifference John Donne's theorem that 'No man is an island,' but giving that theorem a twist: that which is a mental and a moral island is not a man .

I feel the hot winds of karma driving me.

Can anyone alter fate? All of us combined... or one great figure... or someone strategically placed, who happens to be in the right spot. Chance. Accident. And our lives, our world, hanging on it.

I've always told people that for each person there is a sentence--a series of words--which has the power to destroy him. When Fat told me about Leon Stone I realized (this came years after the first realization) that another sentence exists, another series of words, which will heal the person. If you're lucky you will get the second; but you can be certain of getting the first: that is the way it works.

Whom the gods notice they destroy. Be small… and you will escape the jealousy of the great.

I use this as a paradigm for our whole attitude toward life, what you did was you worked very hard, you try to understand and try to direct these complicated, powerful forces and at the very end of the struggle you've made no progress at all. That upon discovering that, you've raised to a lofty moral height, and you've accepted your fate, and somehow went on.

That's what it means to die, to not be able to stop looking at whatever's in front of you. Some darn thing placed directly there, with nothing you can do about it...