Famous Quotes & Sayings

John W. Gardner

The man who once cursed his fate, now curses himself - and pays his psychoanalyst.

John Steinbeck

...intentions, good or bad, are not enough. There's luck or fate or something else that takes over...

Marie Dressler

Fate cast me to play the role of an ugly duckling with no promise of swanning. . . . I have played my life as a comedy rather than the tragedy many would have made of it.

Marie Corelli

The Browning love story? It is an ideal, all too rare, and yet I hardly think it strange. It would have been far stranger had the fates allowed those two brilliant passionate souls to beat themselves out in silence.

Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach

Not what we experience, but how we perceive what we experience, determines our fate.

Mark Zandi

It has become fashionable to rail against government intervention in the economy, and the FHA is a favorite example by those trying to show the government's overreach. In reality, the FHA shows how government action during the Great Recession forestalled a much worse economic fate.

Theophile Gautier

Fortune loves to give bedroom slippers to people with wooden legs, and gloves to those with no hands.

Theodore Roosevelt

The United States does not have a choice as to whether or not is will or will not play a great part in the world. Fate has made that choice for us. The only question is whether we will play the part well or badly.

Terry Pratchett

What's the good of having mastery over cosmic balance and knowing the secrets of fate if you can't blow something up?

Margaret Drabble

Novels, since the birth of the genre, have been full of rejected, seduced, and abandoned maidens, whose proper fate is to die...

Margaret Heffernan

It is nobody's right to be waited on and nobody's fate to do the waiting.

Michelle Alexander

The fate of millions of people—indeed the future of the black community itself—may depend on the willingness of those who care about racial justice to re-examine their basic assumptions about the role of the criminal justice system in our society.

Michael Parenti

Ecology's implications for capitalism are too momentous for the capitalist to contemplate. The plutocrats are more wedded to their wealth than to the Earth upon which they live, more concerned with the fate of their fortunes than with the fate of humanity. The present ecological crisis has been created by the few at the expense of the many.

Maurice Strong

Nothing less than the fate of the planet is at stake... No place on the planet can remain an island of affluence in a sea of misery.

Matthew Lillard

You may not have faith in my friend fate, But my friend fate has faith in you.

Matthew Arnold

Fate gave, what Chance shall not control, His sad lucidity of soul.

Matthew Arnold

They... who await. No gifts from Chance, have conquered Fate.

Meg Rosoff

Fate isn't some middle-aged man with a squint who won't recognize you if you change your clothes.

Maxim Gorky

All that is called Destiny or Fate is none other than the result of our thoughtlessness and our mistrust of ourselves; we should know that all that is created on earth is created by its sole Master and Laborer -- Man.

Max Beerbohm

Fate weaves the darkness, which is perhaps why she weaves so badly.

P. J. O'Rourke

African famine is not a visitation of fate. It is largely man-made, and the men who made it are largely Africans.

Plato

All things are in fate, yet all things are not decreed by fate.

Paul Zane Pilzer

It is thus hardly surprising that so many of the great minds in recent history have concerned themselves with economic matters. Indeed, they have come to regard economic theory in precisely the same way the ancient philosophers viewed the heavens - as the key to understanding and controlling our fate.

Martin Schulz

Refugees cost us money too when they come to us. If we improve their living conditions in Turkey, we create an incentive for them to stay there and not to place their fates in the hands of smugglers.

Laini Taylor

Was there any fate more bitter than to get what you long for most, when it's too late?

Laini Taylor

Perhaps Fate laid out your life for you like a dress on a bed, and you could either wear it or go naked.

Lisa See

I wonder if there was anything I would have done differently. I hope I would have done everything differently, except I know everything would have turned out the same. That's the meaning of fate.

Lisa See

I didn't know you would be here last night, but you were. We can't fight fate. Instead, we must accept that fate has given us a special opportunity.

Lisa Kleypas

It seemed as if some subtle current of recognition had passed between them... not as if they had met before... but as if they had come close several times until finally an impatient Fate had forced their paths to intersect.

Lisa Kleypas

Fate is the malevolent little jester sitting up in the heavens and pondering over how ridiculous we humans are and he does his best to make fools out of all of us. And sooner or later he succeeds.

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.