quotations about fate
The controversy about the fate of humanity is central and inherent in our cultural life. An apprehensive watchfulness hangs in the air. This is a sign of the times. There is no end to the facts and statistics cited as evidence in support of the opinions about where we are heading. Optimism and pessimism, enthusiasm and alarm, all shades, all degrees. There are penetrating insights, and illuminating interpretations of institutions, behavior and events. Persuasive arguments and diagnosis, an abundant bibliography, and a sleepless irony that misses nothing. We watch ourselves closely.
MARTY GLASS
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Yuga
Whoever yields properly to Fate, is deemed
Wise among men, and knows the laws of heaven.
EURIPIDES
Fragment
No experience has been too unimportant, and the smallest event unfolds like a fate, and fate itself is like a wonderful, wide fabric in which every thread is guided by an infinitely tender hand and laid alongside another thread and is held and supported by a hundred others.
RAINER MARIA RILKE
letter, Letters to a Young Poet, Apr. 23, 1903
Fate and victory shift ... now this way, now that way -- like a line of unarmored men under a hail of enemy arrows.
DAN SIMMONS
Ilium
The youth should be taught that he alone is great, who, by a life heroic, conquers fate; that diligence is the mother of good luck; that, nine times out of ten, what we call luck or fate is but a mere bugbear of the indolent, the languid, the purposeless, the careless, the indifferent; that the man who fails, as a rule, does not see or seize his opportunity.
ORISON SWETT MARDEN
Architects of Fate
All we can control in life is our own choices, how we choose to live and deal with what life has to offer. Everything else is fate.
MARK PURYEAR
The Nature of Asatru
One could not know where it was that one had taken the path one was upon but only that one was upon it.
CORMAC MCCARTHY
Cities of the Plain
Thy fate is like to his who glared, in mirth,
A meteor of wrath and power unblest,
Purging, perchance, some grossness from the earth,
But trenching with deep thunder-scars her breast.
WILLIAM BALL
Creation
The realm of fate is self-limited, and from every part the decree has gone forth that the realm of freedom shall not be invaded. Fate is one unit, freedom another unit. And there is nothing in the one element of nature that is in the other. There is a line, on the one side of which all is fate and on the other freedom, and neither can trespass upon the territory of the other. Man may utilize both for his good and for the glory of God.
H. H. MOORE
Methodist Review
Struggling against your fate is like wrestling the wind.
FRANCINE RIVERS
Unveiled: Tamar
Fate isn't moral. Most people have the idea that they have the possibility to choose and have a free will. Ironically enough, these people only have the illusion that they can choose; in fact their future is already existing in their past.
ERIC DE VRIES
Hedge-Rider
Thus we trace Fate, in matter, mind, and mortals--in race, in retardations of strata, and in thought and character as well. It is everywhere bound or limitation. But Fate has its lord; limitation its limits; is different seen from above and from below; from within and from without. For, though Fate is immense, so is power, which is the other fact in the dual world, immense. If Fate follows and limits power, power attends and antagonizes Fate. We must respect Fate as natural history, but there is more than natural history. For who and what is this criticism that pries into the matter? Man is not order of nature, sack and sack, belly and members, link in a chain, nor any ignominous baggage, but a stupendous antagonism, a dragging together of the poles of the Universe.
RALPH WALDO EMERSON
The Conduct of Life
We must now be trained to do something we formerly assumed everyone would do simply by virtue of being human, being at one with an immemorial 'internal tradition': not identically, not correctly, but in one of the countless variations and moments, the 'give and take', whose dynamic interplay told the story and composed the spontaneous equilibrium of the commonweal, unplanned, unpremeditated, and 'unintentional'--just as the interaction of innumerable entities, elements and events composes the immense harmony, the perfection, of Nature: individually and collectively neither 'right' nor 'wrong', neither for better nor for worse, neither happy nor unhappy, neither 'correct' nor 'incorrect', neither 'progressive' nor 'reactionary', neither structured nor unstructured, neither wise nor foolish, but 'as it is', 'as things go', the Will of God, the fall of the dice, karma, Fate, the wheel of fortune, the Way. The Way that is beyond and prior to our judgments or discriminations or partisanships, the Way, the ancient Tao we once were, once saw, once recognized, once adored, as our own, our Self.
MARTY GLASS
Yuga
All human things are subject to decay,
And, when fate summons, monarchs must obey.
JOHN DRYDEN
Mac Flecknoe
One who says "Fate is directing me to do this" is brainless, and the goddess of fortune abandons him.
VANKATESANANDA
The Concise Yogi Vasistha
The element running through entire nature, which we popularly call Fate, is known to us as limitation. Whatever limits us, we call Fate. If we are brute and barbarous, the fate takes a brute and dreadful shape. As we refine, our checks become finer. If we rise to spiritual culture, the antagonism takes a spiritual form. In the Hindu fables, Vishnu follows Maya through all her ascending changes, from insect and crawfish up to elephant; whatever form she took, he took the male form of that kind, until she became at last woman and goddess, and he a man and a god. The limitations refine as the soul purifies, but the ring of necessity is always perched at the top.
RALPH WALDO EMERSON
The Conduct of Life
Believing in fate has probably always arisen in part because of the delights and terrors of storytelling. We have to realize--to learn--that in life we are not the readers but the authors of our own narratives.
MARGARET VISSER
Beyond Fate
Fate is a manifestation of natural causes. That’s it. It’s not a conscious entity. It has no plan.
WALTER WYKES
The Fly
Men make their own history; but they make it under given conditions, and they become entangled thereby in a fate which is in part the result of other men having made their own history earlier.
REINHARD BENDIX
Force
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.
JAMES LEVINE
The Blue Notebook