Famous Quotes & Sayings

Baroness Orczy

Fate is usually swift when she deals a blow.

Deb Caletti

Fate is a shape-shifter. It is the kindest and most generous entity imaginable, laying out more goodness than a person deserves, and then it shrinks and curls and forms into something grotesque. You think something is one thing, but then it´s another.

Deb Caletti

If fate is a shape-shifter, then loves is too. It can be, anyway, in its most dangerous form. It´s your best day and then your worst. It´s your most hope and then you most despair. Lightness, darkness, it can swing between extremes at lightning speed- a boat upon the water on the most dangerous day, and then the clouds crawl in and the sky turns black and the sea rages and the boat is lost.

Dick Cavett

Anyone working in the media can tell you that there seems to be an always-ready-to-explode segment of the populace for whom offense is a fate worse than anything imaginable. You'd think offense is one of the most calamitous things that could happen to a human being; right up there with the loss of a limb, or just missing a parking space.

Alexis de Tocqueville

above this race of men stands an immense and tutelary power, which takes upon itself alone to secure their gratifications, and to watch over their fate. That power is absolute, minute, regular, provident, and mild. It would be like the authority of a parent, if, like that authority, its object was to prepare them for manhood; but it seeks, on the contrary, to keep them in perpetual childhood...

Albert Schweitzer

It is the fate of every truth to be an object of ridicule when it is first acclaimed.

Arthur Koestler

Coincidence may be described as the chance encounter of two unrelated causal chains which-miraculously, it seems-merge into a significant event. It provides the neatest paradigm of the bisociation of previously separate contexts, engineered by fate. Coincidences are puns of destiny. In the pun, two strings of thought are tangled into one acoustic knot; in the coincidental happening, two strings of events are knitted together by invisible hands.

Arthur Koestler

Man's destiny was no longer determined from 'above' by a super-human wisdom and will, but from 'below' by the sub-human agencies of glands, genes, atoms, or waves of probability. ...they could determine his fate, but could provide him with no moral guidance, no values and meaning. A puppet of the Gods is a tragic figure, a puppet suspended on his chromosomes is merely grotesque.

Azar Nafisi

Only curiosity about the fate of others, the ability to put ourselves in their shoes, and the will to enter their world through the magic of imagination, creates this shock of recognition. Without this empathy there can be no genuine dialogue, and we as individuals and nations will remain isolated and alien, segregated and fragmented.

Ayn Rand

I do not think that tragedy is our natural fate and I do not live in chronic dread of disaster. It is no happiness, but suffering that I consider unnatural. It is not success, but calamity that I regard as the abnormal exception in Human Life.

Ayn Rand

They had rejected the soul-body dichotomy, with its two corollaries: the impotence of man's mind and the damnation of this earth; they had rejected the doctrine of suffering as man's metaphysical fate, they proclaimed man's right to the pursuit of happiness and were determined to establish on earth the conditions required for man's proper existence, by the "unaided" power of their intellect.

Ayn Rand

But I still wonder how it was possible, in those graceless years of transition, long ago, that men did not see whither they were going, and went on, in blindness and cowardice, to their fate. I wonder, for it is hard for me to conceive how men who knew the word "I," could give it up and not know what they lost. But such has been the story, for I have lived in the City of the damned, and I know what horror men permitted to be brought upon them.

Benito Mussolini

Statesman only talk of fate when they have blundered

Benito Mussolini

The fate of nations is intimately bound up with their powers of reproduction. All nations and all empires first felt decadence gnawing at them when their birth rate fell off.

Benjamin Disraeli

A man's fate is his own temper.

Benjamin Disraeli

A person's fate is their own temper.

Benjamin Disraeli

A very remarkable people the Zulus: they defeat our generals, they convert our bishops, they have settled the fate of a great European dynasty.

Benjamin Disraeli

We make our fortunes and we call them fate.

Ben Crenshaw

I'm going to leave y'all with one thought. I'm a big believer in fate. I have a good feeling about this.

Dana Carvey

My fate is very precarious, ... I don't want the show to suffer because I may not be able to come back next week.

One of our nemeses is rebounding. That sealed our fate.

A nation is a totality of men united through community of fate into a community of character.

We've got to get better. We had four or five scoring opportunities. When you have two tipped passes that would have been completions that go for interceptions and hurt you, well, fate is not with you that day.

The grand jury obviously saw that they would have suffered the same fate if it were any other driver.

Bobby Miller

While the parasite, Ariel Sharon, was talking about turning Palestinians into a pastrami sandwich, fate turned Sharon into a vegetable.

Stephen Jay Gould

Obsolescence is a fate devoutly to be wished, lest science stagnate and die.

Kazuo Ishiguro

Perhaps there are those who are able to go about their lives unfettered by such concerns. But for those like us, our fate is to face the world as orphans, chasing through long years the shadows of vanished parents. There is nothing for it but to try and see through our missions to the end, as best we can, for until we do so, we will be permitted no calm.

Kin Hubbard

Lots of folks confuse bad management with destiny.

William Shakespeare

This day's black fate on more days doth depend; This but begins the woe, others must end.

William Shakespeare

what cannot be saved when fate takes, patience her injury a mockery makes

Pierre Corneille

He should be envied Who when his strength is spent lays down his life. Old age reserves a melancholy fate For noble souls before their life is done.

Don Marquis

Fate often puts all the material for happiness and prosperity into a man's hands just to see how miserable he can make himself with them.

Virgil

Wherever the fates lead us let us follow.