Famous Quotes & Sayings

Sophocles

Yet I pity the poor wretch, though he's my enemy. He's yoked to an evil delusion, but the same fate could be mine. I see clearly: we who live are all phantoms, fleeing shadows.

Ray Kurzweil

The fate of the universe is a decision yet to be made, one which we will intelligently consider when the time is right.

Tanith Lee

In the greater part of humankind there resides an instinct for survival. It is this which can clutch at straws and effect a rescue from them. It is this which can, now and then, outwit fate.

Rosamund Pike

In the original computer game of Doom, you not only have to kill things. You have to pulverise them.

Stephanie Pearl-McPhee

I will always buy extra yarn. I will not try to tempt fate.

Soren Kierkegaard

Fate, then, is the nothing of anxiety.

Stephenie Meyer

I walked towards my fate with my destiny standing solidly by my side

Stefan Zweig

Fate is never too generous even to its favorites. Rarely do the gods grant a mortal more than one immortal deed.

Stefan Zweig

And fate? No one alive has ever escaped it, neither brave man nor coward, I tell you-- it's born with us the day that we are born.

Stefan Zweig

Those whom fate has dealt hard knocks remain vulnerable for ever afterwards.

Thomas Gray

Beyond the limits of a vulgar fate, Beneath the good how far,-but far above the great.

Thomas Gray

Commerce changes the fate and genius of nations.

Thomas Hardy

Well, these sad and hopeless obstacles are welcome in one sense, for they enable us to look with indifference upon the cruel satires that Fate loves to indulge in.

Thomas Hardy

Indifference to fate which, though it often makes a villain of a man, is the basis of his sublimity when it does not.

Thomas B. Macaulay

The Orientals have another word for accident; it is "kismet,"--fate.

Thomas Ligotti

Officially there are no fates worse than death. Unofficially, there is a profusion of such fates. For some people, just living with the thought that they will die is a fate worse than death itself.

William Shakespeare

What fates impose, that men must needs abide; it boots not to resist both wind and tide.

William Shatner

Fate gives you the finger and you accept.

William McKinley

We need Hawaii just as much and a good deal more than we did California. It is Manifest Destiny.

William James

We are spinning our own fates, good or evil, never to be undone.

William Friedkin

There is a thin line between the policeman and the criminal. The best cops are always crossed. The best cops are the ones who are able to think like criminals. But for a quirk of fate, they might have been criminals.

Whitney Cummings

I remember my agent at ICM at the beginning of my career telling me that I wasn't pretty enough, that I was always going to be a quirky sidekick. And he was an ogre of a man. He should have been carrying a torch. If he was in a bar, he couldn't have come near me, and then he was deciding my fate.

Sarah Addison Allen

Fate never promises to tell you everything up front. You aren't always shown the path in life you're supposed to take. But if there was one thing she'd learned in the past few weeks, it was that sometimes, when you're really lucky, you meet someone with a map.

Ugo Betti

We cannot bear to regard ourselves simply as playthings of blind chance, we cannot admit to feeling ourselves abandoned.

Ulrich Beck

In the first instance, therefore, global terrorism created a kind of global community sharing a common fate, something we had previously considered impossible.

Richard Dawkins

Either it is true that a medicine works or it isn't. It cannot be false in the ordinary sense but true in some alternative sense. If a therapy or treatment is anything more than a placebo, properly conducted double-blind trials, statistically analyzed, will eventually bring it through with flying colours. Many candidates for recognition as orthodox medicines fail the test and are summarily dropped. The alternative label should not (though, alas, it does) provide immunity from the same fate.

Robert Neelly Bellah

We may wonder at the choice of Israel and Rome as the archetypes of the new nation, in view of the long history of suffering of the former and the decline of the latter. We may wonder that our ancestors over-looked the darker days of those earlier nations. They did not. They hoped to construct a republic on principles to sound that if we should decline in piety and public virtue we would meet the inexorable fate of nations, which are as but dust in the hands of God.

Richard Hofstadter

It has been our fate as a nation not to have ideologies but to be one.

Rebecca West

The word 'idiot' comes from a Greek root meaning private person. Idiocy is the female defect: intent on their private lives, women follow their fate through a darkness deep as that cast by malformed cells in the brain. It is no worse than the male defect, which is lunacy: men are so obsessed by public affairs that they see the world as by moonlight, which shows the outlines of every object but not the details indicative of their nature.

Thomas Sowell

Our fate is matched by the total freedom we have to react to our fate. It is as if we were dealt a hand of card. Once we have them, we are free to play them as we choose.

Thomas Sowell

The murder of a dozen innocent people is unquestionably a human tragedy. But that is no excuse for reacting blindly by preventing hundreds of thousands of other people from defending themselves against meeting the same fate.

Thomas Sowell

The people made worse off by slavery were those who were enslaved. Their descendants would have been worse off today if born in Africa instead of America. Put differently, the terrible fate of their ancestors benefitted them.

Richard Lugar

Despite elections and the experience of post-Soviet personal freedoms by the Russian people, the fate of democracy in Russia is perhaps more ambiguous now than at any time since the collapse of the Communist system.