Famous Quotes & Sayings

Mary Wortley Montagu

I am afraid we are little better than straws upon the water; we may flatter ourselves that we swim, when the current carries us along.

Mary Wortley Montagu

Miserable is the fate of writers: if they are agreeable, they are offensive; and if dull, they starve.

Mary Hunter Austin

No man can be stronger than his destiny.

Marsilio Ficino

The fate of the poor shepherd, who, blinded and lost in the snow-storm, perishes in a drift within a few feet of his cottage door, is an emblem of the state of man.

Martha Gellhorn

The only way I can pay back for what fate and society have handed me is to try, in minor totally useless ways, to make an angry sound against injustice.

Marshall McLuhan

Mass transportation is doomed to failure in North America because a person's car is the only place where he can be alone and think.

Marion Zimmer Bradley

No man or woman can live another's fate

Marguerite Young

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

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

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.

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. 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.

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.

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

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 ...

Terry Pratchett

SOONER OR LATER ALL MEN MUST DIE. EVERYTHING DIES IN THE END. I CAN BE ROBBED BUT NEVER DENIED, I TOLD MYSELF. WHY WORRY? “I too cannot be cheated,” snapped Fate.

Terry Pratchett

Gods play games with the fates of men. But first they have to get all the pieces on the board and look all over the place for the dice.

Terry Pratchett

I'm trying to have a moment o' existential dreed here, right? Crivens, it's a puir lookout if a man canna feel the chilly winds o' fate lashing aroound his netheres wi'out folks telling him he's deid, eh?

Ralph Waldo Emerson

We shun the rugged battle of fate where strength is born.