240 Quotes Tagged: fate

If I'd been a cowboy, it might've ended well.
Somewhere on the ramble, I'm sure I'd have to sell
My guns along the highway. My coins to the table
To make a gambler's double, I'd double debts to pay.
Prob'ly shrink and slink away, It mightn't've ended well.

What If I'd been a sailor? I think it might've ended well.
From August to May
For a searat of man drifting through eternal blue, aboard the finest Debris.
I might've called the shanties. From daybreak to storm's set, lines stay Taught, over rhythm unbroken.
But, oh, there's a schism unspoken, a mighty calling of the lee.
An absentminded Pirate, unaccustomed to the sea;
To the land, a traitor. I think it mightn't've ended well.

What might've worked for me? What might've ended well?
Soldier, to bloody sally forth through hell?
Teacher of glorious stories to tell?
Man of gold, or stores to sell?
Lover to a gentle belle?
Maybe a camel;
A seashell.
What mightn't've been a life where it mightn't've ended well?

Sometimes one feels suddenly doomed by fate.

Even the beautiful must perish! That which overcomes gods and men
Moves not the armored heart of the Stygian Zeus.
Only once did love come to soften the Lord of the Shadows,
And just at the threshold he sternly took back his gift.
Neither can Aphrodite heal the wounds of the beautiful youth
That the boar had savagely torn in his delicate body.
Nor can the deathless mother rescue the divine hero
When, at the Scaean gate now falling, he fulfills his fate.
But she ascends from the sea with all the daughters of Nereus,
And she raises a plaint here for her glorious son.
Behold! The gods weep, all the goddesses weep,
That the beautiful perishes, that the most perfect passes away.
But a lament on the lips of loved ones is glorious,
For the ignoble goes down to Orcus in silence.

Nänie

Atheism is a sort of crippled mysticism, [...] Blind nature has created all that we see, as well as all that we do not see - that's a mystical notion.

We were that generation called silent, but we were silent neither, as some thought, because we shared the period's official optimism nor, as others thought, because we feared its official repression. We were silent because the exhilaration of social action seemed to many of us just one more way of escaping the personal, of masking for a while that dread of the meaningless which was man's fate.

Yet it would be your duty to bear it, if you could not avoid it: it is weak and silly to say you cannot bear what it is your fate to be required to bear.

One knows so little. When one knows more it is too late.

No one saves us but ourselves. No one can and no one may. We ourselves must walk the path.

Everywhere man is confronted with fate, with the chance of achieving something through his own suffering.

The best laid schemes o' Mice an' Men,
Gang aft agley.
An' lea'e us nought but grief an' pain,
For promis'd joy!

(To A Mouse)

What is not brought to consciousness, comes to us as fate.

When I was young, I had to choose between the life of being and the life of doing. And I leapt at the latter like a trout to a fly. But each deed you do, each act, binds you to itself and to its consequences, and makes you act again and yet again. Then very seldom do you come upon a space, a time like this, between act and act, when you may stop and simply be. Or wonder who, after all, you are.

But then what does it matter whence comes the gentle nudge that jars the soul into motion and sets it rolling, doomed never again to stop?

Ahab is for ever Ahab, man. This whole act's immutably decreed. 'Twas rehearsed by thee and me a billion years before this ocean rolled. Fool! I am the Fates' lieutenant, I act under orders.

"A breeze ruffled the neat hedges of Privet Drive, which lay silent and tidy under the inky sky, the very last place you would expect astonishing things to happen. Harry Potter rolled over inside his blankets without waking up. One small hand closed on the letter beside him and he slept on, not knowing he was special, not knowing he was famous, not knowing he would be woken in a few hours' time by Mrs. Dursley's scream as she opened the front door to put out the milk bottles, nor that he would spend the next few weeks being prodded and pinched by his cousin Dudley...He couldn't know that at this very moment, people meeting in secret all over the country were holding up their glasses and saying in hushed voices: "To Harry Potter - the boy who lived!