Famous Quotes & Sayings

Robert Hunter

Don't waste the breath to save your face, When you have done your best, And even more is asked of you, Let fate decide the rest.

Robert Louis Stevenson

A horrible sense of blackness and the treachery of fate seized hold upon the soul of the unhappy student.

Tom Morello

If aliens came down and challenged us to a Battle of the Bands to decide the fate of Planet Earth, I would feel very confident putting early Van Halen forward as our champion.

S. J. Perelman

Fate was dealing from the bottom of the deck.

Saadi

The covetous map explores the whole world in pursuit of a subsistence, and fate is close at his heels.

Rosa Luxemburg

The victory of socialism will not descend like fate from heaven.

Susan Orlean

Borders had lousy management and made bad corporate decisions, so its fate is less like a terrible accident than a slow-motion slide into a ditch, but it's hard to be happy about a bookseller's demise.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Whatever limits us we call fate.

Swami Vivekananda

We reap what we sow. We are the makers of our own fate. None else has the blame, none has the praise.

Simone de Beauvoir

The individuals who seem to us most outstanding, who are honored with the name of genius, are those who have proposed to enact the fate of all humanity in their personal existences.

Simone de Beauvoir

One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman. No biological, psychological, or economic fate determines the figure that the human female presents in society; it is civilization as a whole that produces this creature, intermediate between male and eunuch, which is described as feminine.

Simone Weil

As for the spirit of poverty, I do not remember any moment when it was not in me, although only to that unhappily small extent compatible with my imperfection. I fell in love with Saint Francis of Assisi as soon as I came to know about him. I always believed and hoped that one day Fate would force upon me the condition of a vagabond and a beggar which he embraced freely. Actually I felt the same way about prison.

Simon Pegg

We might not know we are seeking people who best enrich our lives, but somehow on a deep subconscious level we absolutely are. Whether the bond is temporary or permanent, whether it succeeds or fails, fate is simply a configuration of choices that combine with others to shape the relationships that surround us. We cannot choose our family, but we can choose our friends, and we sometimes, before we even meet them.

Thomas Mann

Forbearance in the face of fate, beauty constant under torture, are not merely passive. They are a positive achievement, an explicit triumph.

Tom Shales

By a twist of fate rather than anything approaching journalistic enterprise, I did the last major interview with Johnny Carson.

Steven Spielberg

Casting sometimes is fate and destiny more than skill and talent, from a director's point of view.

Stephen Hawking

The initial configuration of the universe may have been chosen by God, or it may itself have been determined by the laws of science. In either case, it would seem that everything in the universe would then be determined by evolution according to the laws of science, so it is difficult to see how we can be masters of our fate.

Stanislaw Jerzy Lec

Perfect imitations must share the fate of the originals.

Sigrid Undset

Many a man is given what is intended for another, but no man is given another's fate.

Sigmund Freud

One becomes gradually accustomed to a new realization of the nature of 'happiness': one has to assume happiness when Fate does not carry out all its threats simultaneously.

Sigmund Freud

I do not doubt that it would be easier for fate to take away your suffering than it would for me. But you will see for yourself that much has been gained if we succeed in turning your hysterical misery into common unhappiness.

Sigmund Freud

The gods retain their threefold task: they must exorcize the terrors of nature, they must reconcile men to the cruelty of Fate, particularly as it is shown in death, and they must compensate them for the sufferings and privations which a civilized life in common has imposed on them.

Shirley Jackson

Fate intervened. Some of us, that day, she led inexorably through the gates of death. Some of us, innocent and unsuspecting, took, unwillingly, that one last step to oblivion. Some of us took very little sugar.

Rick Riordan

Even the gods couldn't devise a fates so twisted.

Thucydides

To be an object of hatred and aversion to their contemporaries has been the usual fate of all those whose merit has raised them above the common level. The man who submits to the shafts of envy for the sake of noble objects pursues a judicious course for his own lasting fame. Hatred dies with its object, while merit soon breaks forth in full splendor, and his glory is handed down to posterity in never-dying strains.

Rick Atkinson

In battle, topography is fate.

Regina Brett

It takes courage to sit on a jury. How many of us want to decide the fate of another person's life or freedom? How many of us want to hold that kind of power in our hands?

Tom Hollander

I do a TV show about a priest in London, and he is also slightly beleaguered and is subject to fate and misfortune and daily difficulty.

Thomas Keller

Whether it's destiny or fate or whatever, I don't think I could do a French Laundry anywhere else.

Thomas Campion

Secret fates Guide our states Both in mirth and mourning.

Viggo Mortensen

We all experience many freakish and unexpected events - you have to be open to suffering a little. The philosopher Schopenhauer talked about how out of the randomness, there is an apparent intention in the fate of an individual that can be glimpsed later on. When you are an old guy, you can look back, and maybe this rambling life has some through-line. Others can see it better sometimes. But when you glimpse it yourself, you see it more clearly than anyone.

Victor Hugo

M. Myriel had to undergo the fate of every newcomer in a little town, where there are many mouths which talk, and very few heads which think.

Thomas Paine

The New Testament, they tell us, is founded upon the prophecies of the Old; if so, it must follow the fate of its foundation.