Famous Quotes & Sayings

John Dryden

Seek not to know what must not be reveal, for joy only flows where fate is most concealed. A busy person would find their sorrows much more; if future fortunes were known before!

John Dryden

For those whom God to ruin has design'd, He fits for fate, and first destroys their mind.

John Dryden

The perverseness of my fate is such that he's not mine because he's mine too much.

John Dryden

The Fates but only spin the coarser clue; The finest of the wool is left for you.

John Masefield

All the great things of life are swiftly done, Creation, death, and love the double gate. However much we dawdle in the sun We have to hurry at the touch of Fate.

Jodie Foster

I think 'destiny' is just a fancy word for a psychological pattern.

Katherine Anne Porter

all working, practical political systems, even those professing to originate in moral grandeur, are based upon and operate by contempt of human life and the individual fate ...

Katharine Hepburn

I'm a legend because I've survived over a long period of time and still seem to be master of my fate - I'm still paddling the goddamned boat myself.

Joseph Conrad

It is to be remarked that a good many people are born curiously unfitted for the fate waiting them on this earth.

Joseph Haydn

The life's story of great geniuses is a sad one, without much tangible reward, which does not inspire future generations to face a similar fate. Alas also, it stands to reason why so many talent will not come to sparkle on the artistic firmanent.

Joseph Butler

Things and actions are what they are, and the consequences of them will be what they will be: why then should we desire to be deceived?

Joseph Gordon-Levitt

Well, look who I ran into," crowed Coincidence. "Please," flirted Fate, "this was meant to be.

Julie Garwood

Lady Madelyne had sealed her own fate. She'd warmed his feet.

Karl Kraus

When I take up my pen, nothing can happen to me. Fate, remember that.

Kami Garcia

Fate is a wheel that turns without our hand

Kami Garcia

Fate decides until challenged by the fated

Julian Huxley

As political and economic freedom diminishes, sexual freedom tends to compensatingly increase and the dictator... will do well to encourage that freedom in conjunction with the freedom to daydream under the influence of dope, movies, and radio. It will help to reconcile his subjects to the servitude which is their fate.

Paul Tillich

The anxiety of fate is conquered by the self-affirmation of the individual as an infinitely significant microcosmic representation of the universe .

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.

Ozzy Osbourne

Do you know what causes low voter turnout in America? It's the result of having the fate of our nation at stake. This began with the bitter presidential election of 1828, which pitted the education, cultivation, and puritan constraint of John Quincy Adams against the yahoo populism of Andrew Jackson, thereby deciding permanently whether America would become a shining city upon a hill or an overlighted strip mall along a highway.

P. G. Wodehouse

...it has been well said that it is precisely these moments when we are feeling that ours is the world and everything that's in it that Fate selects for sneaking up on us with the rock in the stocking.

P. G. Wodehouse

I'm not absolutely certain of the facts, but I rather fancy it's Shakespeare who says that it's always just when a fellow is feeling particularly braced with things in general that Fate sneaks up behind him with the bit of lead piping.

P. G. Wodehouse

Unseen in the background, Fate was quietly slipping lead into the boxing-glove.

Ovid

Had I not sinned what would there be for you to pardon. My fate has given you the opportunity for mercy.

Mary Wortley Montagu

I am afraid we are little better than straws upon the water; we may flatter ourselves that we swim, when the current carries us along.

Mary Wortley Montagu

Miserable is the fate of writers: if they are agreeable, they are offensive; and if dull, they starve.

Mary Hunter Austin

No man can be stronger than his destiny.

Marsilio Ficino

The fate of the poor shepherd, who, blinded and lost in the snow-storm, perishes in a drift within a few feet of his cottage door, is an emblem of the state of man.

Martha Gellhorn

The only way I can pay back for what fate and society have handed me is to try, in minor totally useless ways, to make an angry sound against injustice.