Famous Quotes & Sayings

Jean-Paul Sartre

All human actions are equivalent... and all are on principle doomed to failure.

Georges Duhamel

In the beds which the piety of the public has prepared on every side, stricken men await the verdict of fate.

George S. Patton

Sometimes I think your life and mine are under the protection of some supreme being or fate , because, after many years of parallel thought, we find ourselves in the positions we now occupy.

Jim Harrison

Fate has never ladled out hardship very evenly, and this frequently trips our often infantile sense of justice.

Neil deGrasse Tyson

I remain unconvinced that anything other than rapid decomposition is the fate of my body and mind after death.

John W. Gardner

The man who once cursed his fate, now curses himself - and pays his psychoanalyst.

John Steinbeck

...intentions, good or bad, are not enough. There's luck or fate or something else that takes over...

John Scott

The true experimenters are there but no-one hears about them - the critical/review system tends to concentrate on the handful of 'major' writers and their promising successors; bookshops tend not to sell them; publishers don't promote them. It's the same fate as has befallen poetry.

John Philpot Curran

It is the common fate of the indolent to see their rights become prey to the active. The conditions upon which God hath given liberty to man is eternal vigilance; which condition if he break, servitude is at once the consequence of his crime, and the punishment of his guilt.

Mark Strand

Nothing is the destiny of everyone, it is our commonness made dumb.

Mark Steyn

To expect the government to save you is to be a bystander in your own fate.

Nancy Farmer

But I also know that to ignore joy while it lasts, in favor of lamenting one's fate, is a great crime.

Skylar Astin

You definitely have to be focused at certain times in your life and in your career, but at the end of the day, there's only so much you can do. Then you just have to chock it up to fate.

Marie Dressler

Fate cast me to play the role of an ugly duckling with no promise of swanning. . . . I have played my life as a comedy rather than the tragedy many would have made of it.

Marie Corelli

The Browning love story? It is an ideal, all too rare, and yet I hardly think it strange. It would have been far stranger had the fates allowed those two brilliant passionate souls to beat themselves out in silence.

Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach

Not what we experience, but how we perceive what we experience, determines our fate.

Mark Zandi

It has become fashionable to rail against government intervention in the economy, and the FHA is a favorite example by those trying to show the government's overreach. In reality, the FHA shows how government action during the Great Recession forestalled a much worse economic fate.

Theophile Gautier

Fortune loves to give bedroom slippers to people with wooden legs, and gloves to those with no hands.

Theodore Roosevelt

The United States does not have a choice as to whether or not is will or will not play a great part in the world. Fate has made that choice for us. The only question is whether we will play the part well or badly.

Terry Pratchett

What's the good of having mastery over cosmic balance and knowing the secrets of fate if you can't blow something up?

Margaret Drabble

Novels, since the birth of the genre, have been full of rejected, seduced, and abandoned maidens, whose proper fate is to die...

Margaret Heffernan

It is nobody's right to be waited on and nobody's fate to do the waiting.

Paulo Coelho

Whenever I refused to follow my fate, something very hard to bear would happen in my life.

Mark Akenside

The immortal mind, superior to his fate, amid the outrage of external things, firm as the solid base of this great world, rests on his own foundation. Blow, ye winds! Ye waves! ye thunders! roll your tempests on! Shake, ye old pillars of the marble sky! Till at its orbs and all its worlds of fire be loosen'd from their seats; yet still serene, the unconquer'd mind looks down upon the wreck; and ever stronger as the storms advance, firm through the closing ruin holds is way, when nature calls him to the destin'd goal.

Meghan O'Rourke

We have an idea - a very modern idea - that dying is undignified. But I think this is because we have the illusion that we can control our bodies and our fates.

Maurice Strong

Nothing less than the fate of the planet is at stake... No place on the planet can remain an island of affluence in a sea of misery.

Matthew Lillard

You may not have faith in my friend fate, But my friend fate has faith in you.

Matthew Arnold

Fate gave, what Chance shall not control, His sad lucidity of soul.

Matthew Arnold

They... who await. No gifts from Chance, have conquered Fate.

Meg Rosoff

Fate isn't some middle-aged man with a squint who won't recognize you if you change your clothes.

Maxim Gorky

All that is called Destiny or Fate is none other than the result of our thoughtlessness and our mistrust of ourselves; we should know that all that is created on earth is created by its sole Master and Laborer -- Man.

Max Beerbohm

Fate weaves the darkness, which is perhaps why she weaves so badly.

P. J. O'Rourke

African famine is not a visitation of fate. It is largely man-made, and the men who made it are largely Africans.