Famous Quotes & Sayings

Marguerite Young

I never thought of myself as either a woman or a man. I thought of myself as a person who was born to a writer, who was doomed to be a writer.

Marguerite Young

we live our fate before we realize exactly what it is.

Paul Auster

We are left with nothing but death, the irreducible fact of our own mortality. Death after a long illness we can accept with resignation. Even accidental death we can ascribe to fate. But for a man to die of no apparent cause, for a man to die simply because he is a man, brings us so close to the invisible boundary between life and death that we no longer know which side we are on. Life becomes death, and it is as if this death has owned this life all along. Death without warning. Which is to say: life stops. And it can stop at any moment.

Katherine Paterson

I was behaving, just like I promised, but fate intervened.

Mary McCarthy

As soon as you become a writer, you lose contact with ordinary experience or tend to. ... the worst fate of a writer is to become a writer.

Muhammad Iqbal

Conduct, which involves a decision of the ultimate fate of the agent cannot be based on illusions.

Muhammad Iqbal

I am a hidden meaning made to defy. The grasp of words, and walk away With free will and destiny. As living, revolutionary clay.

Muhammad Iqbal

Destiny is the prison and chain of the ignorant. Understand that destiny like the water of the Nile: Water before the faithful, blood before the unbeliever.

Mikhail Khodorkovsky

A left turn in the fate of Russia is as necessary as it is inevitable.

Mikhail Bulgakov

No one's fate is of any interest to you except your own.

Mikhail Bulgakov

But what can be done, the one who loves must share the fate of the one he loves.

Miguel de Unamuno

Man is perishing. That may be, and if it is nothingness that awaits us let us so act that it will be an unjust fate.

Naomi Klein

So we are left with a stark choice: allow climate disruption to change everything about our world, or change pretty much everything about our economy to avoid that fate. But we need to be very clear: because of our decades of collective denial, no gradual, incremental options are now available to us.

R. D. Laing

Alienation as our present destiny is achieved only by outrageous violence perpetrated by human beings on human beings.

R. Buckminster Fuller

If man chooses oblivion, he can go right on leaving his fate to his political leaders. If he chooses Utopia, he must initiate an enormous education program - immediately, if not sooner.

Leonardo da Vinci

Oysters open completely when the moon is full; and when the crab sees one it throws a piece of stone or seaweed into it and the oyster cannot close again so that it serves the crab for meat. Such is the fate of him who opens his mouth too much and thereby puts himself at the mercy of the listener.

Oscar Wilde

The world is changed because you are made of ivory and gold. The curves of your lips rewrite history.

Letitia Baldrige

if the right man does not come along, there are many fates far worse. One is to have the wrong man come along.

Learned Hand

Each one of us must in the end choose for himself how far he would like to leave our collective fate to the wayward vagaries of popular assemblies For myself it would be most irksome to be ruled by a bevy of Platonic Guardians, even if I knew how to choose them, which I assuredly do not I should miss the stimulus of living in a society where I have, at least theoretically, some part in the direction of public affairs.

Lajos Kossuth

And if you cannot remain indifferent, you must resolve to throw your weight into that balance in which the fate and condition of man is weighed.

Lajos Kossuth

Even in political considerations, now-a-days, you have stronger motives to feel interested in the fate of Europe than in the fate of the Central or Southern parts of America.

Kazuo Ishiguro

What interests me is the surprising enormous extent to which most people accept the fate that's been given to them, and find some dignity.

Kresley Cole

Fate has a way of getting what she wants, no matter how we try to avoid it.

Margaret Atwood

I suppose it's everyone's fate to be reduced to quaintness by those younger than themselves.

Pope Benedict XVI

Concern for the fate of the great rivers of the earth must lead us to reflect soberly on the model of development which our society is pursuing. A purely economic and technological understanding of progress, to the extent that it fails to acknowledge its intrinsic limitations and to take into consideration the integral good of humanity, will inevitably provoke negative consequences for individuals, peoples and creation itself.

Peter Ackroyd

There is a word in Old English which belongs wholly to that civilization - "dustsceawung," meaning contemplation of dust. It is a true image of the Anglo-Saxon mind, or at least an echo of that consciousness which considered transcience and loss to be part of the human estate; it was a world in which life was uncertain and the principal diety was fate or destiny or "wyrd."

Peter Lynch

It isn't the head but the stomach that determines the fate of the stockpicker.

Primo Levi

Nothing can be said: nothing sure, nothing probable, nothing honest. Better to err through omission than through commission: better to refrain from steering the fate of others, since it is already so difficult to navigate one's own.

Plutarch

Fate, however, is to all appearance more unavoidable than unexpected.

Plutarch

Fate leads him who follows it, and drags him who resist.

Plutarch

No man ever wetted clay and then left it, as if there would be bricks by chance and fortune.

Pearl S. Buck

Fatalism is a false premise. What will be is not necessarily what must be ...

Peter Straub

I generally wade in blind and trust to fate and instinct to see me through.