Famous Quotes & Sayings

John F. Kennedy

The American presidency will demand more than ringing manifestos issued from the rear of the battle. It will demand that the President place himself in the very thick of the fight; that he care passionately about the fate of the people he leads .

Leo Tolstoy

Whatever our fate is or may be, we have made it and do not complain of it." - Vronksy {Anna Karenina}

Leo Strauss

The Jewish people and their fate are the living witness for the absence of redemption. This, one could say, is the meaning of the chosen people; the Jews are chosen to prove the absence of redemption.

Larry McMurtry

Call listened with amusement--not that the incident hadn't been terrible. Being decapitated was a grisly fate, whether you were a Yankee or not. But then, amusing things happened in battle, as they did in the rest of life. Some of the funniest things he had ever witnessed had occurred during battles. He had always found it more satisfying to laugh on a battlefield than anywhere else, for if you lived to laugh on a battlefield, you could feel you had earned the laugh. But if you just laughed in a saloon, or at a social, the laugh didn't reach deep.

Joseph Stiglitz

The top 1 percent have the best houses, the best educations, the best doctors, and the best lifestyles, but there is one thing that money doesn't seem to have bought: an understanding that their fate is bound up with how the other 99 percent live. Throughout history, this is something that the top 1 percent eventually do learn. Too late.

Joseph Campbell

The Fates guide those who will and drag those who won't!

Karl Popper

We have become makers of our fate when we have ceased to pose as its prophets.

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.

Jimmy Buffett

Yes, I am a pirate, two hundred years to late. Cannons don't thunder, there's nothing to plunder, I'm an over forty victim of fate.

Jim Sensenbrenner

In a sad twist of fate, the bill to reauthorize the Patriot Act was debated on the floor of the House of Representatives the same day that terrorists struck again.

Joanna Baillie

My day is closed! the gloom of night is come! a hopeless darkness settles over my fate.

Ellen Hopkins

TRIAD: Three separate highways intersect at a place no reasonable person would ever want to go. Three lives that would have been cut short, if not for hasty interventions by loved ones. Or Fate. Three people, with nothing at all in common except age, proximity, and a wish to die. Three tapestries, tattered at the edges and come unwoven to reveal a single mutual thread.

Ellen Hopkins

Maybe Life is random. No fate. No God. Just Time.

Elizabeth Gilbert

I thought about one of my favorite Sufi poems, which says that God long ago drew a circle in the sand exactly around the spot where you are standing right now. I was never not coming here. This was never not going to happen.

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.

Gayle Forman

In that twisted incestuous way of fate, Mia's a part of our history, and we're among the shards of her legacy.

Gayle Forman

I don’t discount a magical hand of fate. I am an actor, after all, and a Shakespearian, no less. But it can’t be the ruling force of your life. You have to be the driver.

Gayle Forman

Sometimes fate or life or whatever you want to call it, leaves a door a little open and you walk through it. But sometimes it locks the door and you have to find the key, or pick the lock, or knock the damn thing down. And sometimes, it doesn’t even show you the door, and you have to build it yourself.

Lord Acton

The fate of every democracy, of every government based on the sovereignty of the people, depends on the choices it makes between these opposite principles, absolute power on the one hand, and on the other the restraints of legality and the authority of tradition.

Lois McMaster Bujold

I am not a fate worse than death, dammit!

Lyndon B. Johnson

At times history and fate meet at a single time in a single place to shape a turning point in man's unending search for freedom.

Loren Eiseley

I was a shadow among shadows brooding over the fate of other shadows that I alone strove to summon up out of the all-pervading dusk.

Malcolm Gladwell

We [people] can't do much about the fate part, but we can certainly do a lot about the man part.