Famous Quotes & Sayings

Shelby Steele

A black conservative is a black who dissents from the victimization explanation of black fate.

Marcus Aurelius

God overrules all mutinous accidents, brings them under His laws of fate, and makes them all serviceable to His purpose.

Peter Porter

Redeemers always reach the world too late. God dies, we live; God lives, we die. Our fate.

Philip Pullman

We are all subject to the fates. But we must all act as if we are not, or die of despair...death will sweep through all the worlds; it will be the triumph of despair, forever. The universes will all become nothing more than interlocking machines, blind and empty of thought, feeling, life...

Philip Pullman

We are all subject to the fates. But we must act as if we are not, or die of despair.

Philip Pullman

Lee was too cool by nature to rage at fate; his manner was to raise an eyebrow and greet it laconically.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

We may be partial, but Fate is not.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Our condition as men is risky and ticklish enough. One can not be sure of himself and his fortune an hour, but he may be whisked off into some pitiable or ridiculous plight.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Intellect annuls fate. So far as a man thinks he is free.

Leo Strauss

The Jewish people and their fate are the living witness for the absence of redemption. This, one could say, is the meaning of the chosen people; the Jews are chosen to prove the absence of redemption.

Larry McMurtry

Call listened with amusement--not that the incident hadn't been terrible. Being decapitated was a grisly fate, whether you were a Yankee or not. But then, amusing things happened in battle, as they did in the rest of life. Some of the funniest things he had ever witnessed had occurred during battles. He had always found it more satisfying to laugh on a battlefield than anywhere else, for if you lived to laugh on a battlefield, you could feel you had earned the laugh. But if you just laughed in a saloon, or at a social, the laugh didn't reach deep.

Joseph Stiglitz

The top 1 percent have the best houses, the best educations, the best doctors, and the best lifestyles, but there is one thing that money doesn't seem to have bought: an understanding that their fate is bound up with how the other 99 percent live. Throughout history, this is something that the top 1 percent eventually do learn. Too late.

Julian Huxley

As political and economic freedom diminishes, sexual freedom tends to compensatingly increase and the dictator... will do well to encourage that freedom in conjunction with the freedom to daydream under the influence of dope, movies, and radio. It will help to reconcile his subjects to the servitude which is their fate.

Paul Tillich

The anxiety of fate is conquered by the self-affirmation of the individual as an infinitely significant microcosmic representation of the universe .

Percy Bysshe Shelley

Till the Future dares Forget the Past, his fate and fame shall be An echo and a light unto eternity!

James Levine

Fate is a misplaced retreat. Many people rationalize an unexplained event as fate and shrug their shoulders when it occurs. But that is not what fate is. The world operates as a series of circles that are invisible, for they extend to the upper air. Fate is where these circles cut to earth. Since we cannot see them, do not know their content, and have no sense of their width, it is impossible to predict when these cuts will slice into our reality. When this happens, we call it fate. Fate is not a chance event but one that is inevitable, we are simply blind to its nature and time.

Gayle Forman

Sometimes fate or life or whatever you want to call it, leaves a door a little open and you walk through it. But sometimes it locks the door and you have to find the key, or pick the lock, or knock the damn thing down. And sometimes, it doesn’t even show you the door, and you have to build it yourself.

Lord Acton

The fate of every democracy, of every government based on the sovereignty of the people, depends on the choices it makes between these opposite principles, absolute power on the one hand, and on the other the restraints of legality and the authority of tradition.

Lois McMaster Bujold

I am not a fate worse than death, dammit!

Lyndon B. Johnson

At times history and fate meet at a single time in a single place to shape a turning point in man's unending search for freedom.

Loren Eiseley

I was a shadow among shadows brooding over the fate of other shadows that I alone strove to summon up out of the all-pervading dusk.

Malcolm Gladwell

We [people] can't do much about the fate part, but we can certainly do a lot about the man part.

Malcolm Bradbury

But you are involved in the world, and your actions have consequences for other people, and if you don't recognize that, then that's the supreme kind of cruelty. Everyone shares someone else's fate to some extent.

Maimonides

Eliphas never abandoned his belief that the fate of man is the result of justice, that we do not know all our shortcomings for which we are punished, nor the way how we incur the punishment through them.

Gail Carson Levine

Fate...may...be...thwarted.

Francois Hollande

Austerity need not be Europe's fate.

Haruki Murakami

Sometimes fate is like a small sandstorm that keeps changing directions. You change direction but the sandstorm chases you. You turn again, but the storm adjusts.

Haruki Murakami

And so they parted, she to the east, and he to the west. The test they had agreed upon, however, was utterly unnecessary. They should never have undertaken it, because they really and truly were each other's 100% perfect lovers, and it was a miracle that they had ever met. But it was impossible for them to know this, young as they were. The cold, indifferent waves of fate proceeded to toss them unmercifully.

Haruki Murakami

Fate seems to be taking me in some even stranger directions.

Haruki Murakami

A person’s destiny is something you look back at afterwards, not something to be known in advance.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

The iron hand of necessity commands, and her stern decree is supreme law, to which the gods even must submit. In deep silence rules the uncounselled sister of eternal fate. Whatever she lays upon thee, endure; perform whatever she commands.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Cursed Mammon be, when he with treasures To restless action spurs our fate! Cursed when for soft, indulgent leisures, He lays for us the pillows straight.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Man, be he who he may, experiences a last piece of good fortune and a last day. [Ger., Der Mensch erfahrt, er sei auch wer er mag, Ein letztes Gluck und einen letzten Tag.]