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Quotes of the day: Fate
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Published Friday, October 16, 2015 @ 10:42 PM EDT
Oct 16 2015

A fate is not a punishment.
-Albert Camus

A man's fate is his own temper.
-Benjamin Disraeli

Actors work and slave- and it is the color of your hair that can determine your fate in the end.
-Helen Hayes

At a certain point in our lives, we lose control of what's happening to us, and our lives become controlled by fate. That's the world's greatest lie.
-Paulo Coelho

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.
-Lyndon B. Johnson

Destiny is what you are supposed to do in life. Fate is what kicks you in the ass to do it.
-Henry Miller

Drop the question what tomorrow may bring, and count as profit every day that Fate allows you.
-Horace

Every individual acts and suffers in accordance with his peculiar teleology, which has all the inevitability of fate, so long as he does not understand it.
-Alfred Adler

Fate cannot be sidestepped or outrun.
-Dean Koontz

Fate is like a strange, unpopular restaurant filled with odd little waiters who bring you things you never asked for and don't always like.
-Daniel Handler

Fate is unalterable only in the sense that given a cause, a certain result must follow, but no cause is inevitable in itself, and man can shape his world if he does not resign himself to ignorance.
-Pearl S. Buck

Fate is written in the face.
-Frederico Fellini

Fate often puts all the material for happiness and prosperity into a man's hands just to see how miserable he can make himself.
-Don Marquis

Fate was dealing from the bottom of the deck.
-S.J. Perelman

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

He picked up the lemons that Fate had sent him and started a lemonade-stand.
-Elbert Hubbard

His greatest fear, or nightmare, is not to be thought hip or cool, and if to avoid that terrible fate it means that he has to glamorize evil- well, so be it.
-Theodore Dalrymple

History warns us, however, that it is the customary fate of new truths to begin as heresies and to end as superstitions...
-Thomas Henry Huxley

How a person masters his fate is more important than what his fate it.
-Wilhelm von Humboldt

Human reason has this peculiar fate that in one species of its knowledge it is burdened by questions which, as prescribed by the very nature of reason itself, it is not able to ignore, but which, as transcending all its powers, it is also not able to answer.
-Immanuel Kant

Human reason needs only to will more strongly than fate, and she is fate.
-Thomas Mann

I believe in Spinoza's God, Who reveals Himself in the lawful harmony of the world, not in a God Who concerns Himself with the fate and the doings of mankind.
-Albert Einstein

I believe it is the duty of each of us to act as if the fate of the world depended on him. Admittedly, one man by himself cannot do the job. However, one man can make a difference...
-Hyman Rickover

I cannot say that I am in the slightest degree impressed by your bigness, or your material resources, as such. Size is not grandeur, and territory does not make a nation. The great issue, about which hangs true sublimity, and the terror of overhanging fate, is what are you going to do with all these things?
-Thomas Henry Huxley

I know that I shall meet my fate
Somewhere among the clouds above;
Those that I fight I do not hate,
Those that I guard I do not love;
-William Butler Yeats

I'm just a historical dead end. I hope at least that my fate will serve as an example to you all and to posterity.
-Eugene Ionesco

I'm not absolutely certain of the facts, but I rather fancy it's Shakespeare who says that it's always just when a fellow is feeling particularly braced with things in general that Fate sneaks up behind him with the bit of lead piping.
-P.G. Wodehouse

I've lived enough of my life story to know this- Fate writes the book, but you make the movie.
-Robert Brault

If fate means you to lose, give him a good fight anyhow.
-William McFee

If you can't change your fate, change your attitude.
-Amy Tan

In resigning ourselves to our fate without a struggle, we are guilty of inhumanity.
-Albert Schweitzer

It is the answer that fate gives to all who ask that question, when disaster, death, tragedy, hardship overtake them. 'Why me? Why me? Why me?'... And Fate answers these fools—'Why not?'
-John Gardner

It is the fate of every truth to be an object of ridicule when it is first acclaimed.
-Albert Schweitzer

It is the integrity of each individual human that is in final examination. On personal integrity hangs humanity's fate.
-Buckminster Fuller

It is to be remarked that a good many people are born curiously unfitted for the fate awaiting them on this earth.
-Joseph Conrad

It seems to be the fate of idealists to obtain what they have struggled for in a form which destroys their ideals.
-Bertrand Russell

Kisses are a better fate than wisdom.
-E.E. Cummings

Man is an evasive beast, given to cultivating strange notions about himself. He is humiliated by his simian ancestry, and tries to deny his animal nature, to persuade himself that he is not limited by its weaknesses nor concerned in its fate. And this impulse may be harmless, when it is genuine. But what are we to say when we see the formulas of heroic self-deception made use of by unheroic self-indulgence?
-Upton Sinclair

Man's destiny was no longer determined from 'above' by a super-human wisdom and will, but from 'below' by the sub-human agencies of glands, genes, atoms, or waves of probability. ...they could determine his fate, but could provide him with no moral guidance, no values and meaning. A puppet of the Gods is a tragic figure, a puppet suspended on his chromosomes is merely grotesque.
-Arthur Koestler

Many men would take the death-sentence without a whimper, to escape the life-sentence which fate carries in her other hand.
-T.E. Lawrence

Men are not prisoners of fate, but only prisoners of their own minds.
-Franklin Delano Roosevelt

My fate cannot be mastered; it can only be collaborated with and thereby to some extent, directed. Nor am I the captain of my soul; I am only its noisiest passenger.
-Aldous Huxley

Our hour is marked, and no one can claim a moment of life beyond what fate has predestined.
-Napoleon Bonaparte

Politicians and journalists share the same fate in that they often understand tomorrow the things they talk about today.
-Helmut Schmidt

Sometimes fate hits you with the Clown Hammer of Circumstance and there's nothing to do but sit there and watch the little birds fly around your head.
-Tara Calishain

The best of men cannot suspend their fate:
The good die early, and the bad die late.
-Daniel Defoe

The fate of America cannot depend on any one man. The greatness of America is grounded in principles and not on any single personality.
-Franklin Delano Roosevelt

The fate of our country is now in the hands of people who don't think about what they want until they get right up to the register at McDonald's.
-Stephen Colbert

The fate of our times is characterized by rationalization and intellectualization and, above all, by the disenchantment of the world.
-Max Weber

The fate of this man or that man was less than a drop, although it was a sparkling one, in the great blue motion of the sunlit sea.
-T.H. White

The future is not in the hands of fate but in ours.
-Jules Jusserand

The future is not set. There is no fate but what we make.
-James Cameron

The word 'idiot' comes from a Greek root meaning private person. Idiocy is the female defect: intent on their private lives, women follow their fate through a darkness deep as that cast by malformed cells in the brain. It is no worse than the male defect, which is lunacy: men are so obsessed by public affairs that they see the world as by moonlight, which shows the outlines of every object but not the details indicative of their nature.
-Rebecca West

There is no fate that cannot be surmounted by scorn.
-Albert Camus

There is no more terrible fate for a comedian than to be taken seriously.
-Barry Humphries

These tasks, and therefore the meaning of life, differ from man to man, and from moment to moment. Thus it is impossible to define the meaning of life in a general way. Questions about the meaning of life can never be answered by sweeping statements. 'Life' does not mean something vague, but something very real and concrete, just as life's tasks are also very real and concrete. They form man's destiny, which is different and unique for each individual. No man and no destiny can be compared with any other man or any other destiny. No situation repeats itself, and each situation calls for a different response. Sometimes the situation in which a man finds himself may require him to shape his own fate by action. At other times it is more advantageous for him to make use of an opportunity for contemplation and to realize assets in this way. Sometimes man may be required simple to accept fate, to bear his cross. Every situation is distinguished by its uniqueness, and there is always only one right answer to the problem posed by the situation at hand.
-Viktor Frankl

This death to the logic of emotional commitments of our chance moment in the world of space and time, this recognition of, the shift of our emphasis to, the universal life that throbs and celebrates its victory in the very kiss of our own annihilation, this amor fati, 'love of fate,' love of the fate that is inevitably death, constitutes the experience of the tragic art...
-Joseph Campbell

To be disesteemed by people you don't have much respect for is not the worst fate.
-Mary McCarthy

To expect the government to save you is to be a bystander in your own fate.
-Mark Steyn

To punish me for my contempt for authority, Fate made me an authority myself.
-Albert Einstein

Unseen in the background, Fate was quietly slipping lead into the boxing-glove.
-P.G. Wodehouse

Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.
-Carl Jung

Upon the education of the people of this country the fate of this country depends.
-Benjamin Disraeli

We all play chess with Fate as partner. He makes a move, we make a move. He tries to checkmate us in three moves, we try to prevent it. We know we can't win, but we're driven to give him a good fight.
-Isaac Bashevis Singer

We blame fate for other accidents, but we feel personally responsible when we make a hole in one.
-Unattributed

We make our own fortunes and we call them fate.
-Benjamin Disraeli

We must all study German. When Fate knocks in German, by God you hear it.
-James Thurber

Wealth: A cunning device of Fate whereby men are made captive, and burdened with responsibilites from which only Death can file their fetters.
-Elbert Hubbard

When you go into court you are putting your fate in the hands of twelve people who weren't smart enough to get out of jury duty.
-Norm Crosby

When you're attracted to someone, it just means that your subconscious is attracted to their subconscious, subconsciously. So what we think of as fate is just two neuroses knowing that they are a perfect match.
-Nora Ephron

Why do you complain of your fate when you could so easily change it?
-Marquis de Sade

Youth is a silly, vapid state,
Old age with fears and ills is rife;
This simple boon I beg of Fate-
A thousand years of Middle Life.
-Carolyn Wells

-----

(October 17 is also the birthday of Arthur Miller and Jimmy Breslin.)


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