C.N. Douglas, comp. Forty Thousand Quotations: Prose and Poetical. 1917.
Fate
The die is cast.—The exclamation of Cæsar as he crossed the Rubicon.
Fate is unpenetrated causes.
Fate hath no voice but the heart’s impulse.
No one becomes guilty by fate.
The heart is its own fate.
To bear is to conquer our fate.
From no place can you exclude the fates.
Yet who shall shut out fate?
The compulsion of fate is bitter.
He must needs go that the devil drives.
We bear each one our own destiny.
For rarely man escapes his destiny.
Fulfil thy fate! Be—do—bear—and thank God.
Fair or foul the lot apportioned life on earth, we bear alike.
Fate is character.
We can only obey our own polarity.
This day we fashion destiny, our web of fate we spin.
Heaven from all creatures hides the book of fate.
When fate summons, monarchs must obey.
Wherever the fates lead us let us follow.
Man blindly works the will of fate.
A man’s power is hooped in by a necessity, which, by many experiments, he touches on every side until he learns its arc.
All things are in fate, yet all things are not decreed by fate.
Whither the fates lead virtue will follow without fear.
Many have reached their fate while dreading fate.
The fates glide with linked hands over life.
They only fall that strive to move, or lose that care to keep.
We are led on, like little children, by a way we know not.
We make our fortunes, and we call them fate.
There is no good in arguing with the inevitable.
There is a divinity that shapes our ends, rough-hew them how we will.
Fate and the dooming gods are deaf to tears.
If you believe in fate to your harm, believe it, at least, for your good.
The slippery tops of human state, the gilded pinnacles of fate.
Men are the sport of circumstances, when circumstances seem the sport of men.
The fates lead the willing, and drag the unwilling.
It is often a comfort in misfortune to know our own fate.
Man, be he who he may, experiences a last piece of good fortune and a last day.
Every soul has a landscape that changes with the wind that sweeps the sky, with the clouds that return after its rain.
Struggle against it as thou wilt, yet heaven’s ways are heaven’s ways.
“Whosoever quarrels with his fate, does not understand it,” says Bettine; and among all her inspired sayings, she spoke none wiser.
Fate whirls on the bark, and the rough gale sweeps from the rising tide the lazy calm of thought.
God overrules all mutinous accidents, brings them under His laws of fate, and makes them all serviceable to His purpose.
Fate is the friend of the good, the guide of the wise, the tyrant of the foolish, the enemy of the bad.
Fate with impartial hand turns out the doom of high and low; her capacious urn is constantly shaking the names of all mankind.
Who is it needs such flawless shafts as fate? What archer of his arrows is so choice, or hits the white so surely?
Fates! we will know your pleasures: that we shall die, we know; ’tis but the time, and drawing days out, that men stand upon.
Though fear should lend him pinions like the wind, yet swifter fate will seize him from behind.
Stem fate and time will have their victims; and the best die first, leaving the bad still strong, though past their prime.
No power or virtue of man could ever have deserved that what has been fated should not have taken place.
When fate has allowed to any man more than one great gift, accident or necessity seems usually to contrive that one shall encumber and impede the other.
Lucky he who has been educated to bear his fate, whatsoever it may be, by an early example of uprightness, and a childish training in honor.
A strict belief in fate is the worst of slavery, imposing upon our necks an everlasting lord and tyrant, whom we are to stand in awe of night and day.
Our life is determined for us; and it makes the mind very free when we give up wishing, and only think of bearing what is laid upon us and doing what is given us to do.
A man’s fate is his own temper; and according to that will be his opinion as to the particular manner in which the course of events is regulated. A consistent man believes in destiny, a capricious man in chance.
We defy augury; there is a special providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now, ’tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come: the readiness is all.
Whatever may happen to thee, it was prepared for thee from all eternity; and the implication of causes was from eternity spinning the thread of thy being and of that which is incident to it.
It is an awful thing to get a glimpse, as one sometimes does, when the time is past, of some little, little wheel which works the whole mighty machinery of fate, and see how our destinies turn on a minute’s delay or advance.
As fate is inexorable, and not to be moved either with tears or reproaches, an excess of sorrow is as foolish as profuse laughter; while, on the other hand, not to mourn at all is insensibility.
It was a smart reply that Augustus made to one that ministered this comfort of the fatality of things: this was so far from giving any ease to his mind, that it was the very thing that troubled him.
’Tis the best use of fate to teach a fatal courage. Go face the fire at sea, or the cholera in your friend’s house, or the burglar in your own, or what danger lies in the way of duty, knowing you are guarded by the cherubim of destiny.
The Stoics held a fatality, and a fixed, unalterable course of events; but they held also that they fell out by a necessity emergent from and inherent in the things themselves, which God Himself could not alter.
The wrath peculiar to ardent natures rudely awakened by the sudden annihilation of a hope—dream, if you will—in which the choicest happinesses were thought to be certainly in reach. In such cases nothing intermediate will carry off the passion,—the quarrel is with fate.***It were well in such quarrels if fate were something tangible, to be despatched with a look or a blow, or a speaking personage with whom high words were possible; then the unhappy mortal would not always end the affair by punishing himself.