Fate Quotes

That's life — whichever way you turn, fate sticks out its foot to trip you. -Martin Goldsmith & Martin Mooney, Detour, 1945, spoken by the character Al Roberts


Life is like a game of cards. The hand you are dealt is determinism; the way you play it is free will. -Jawaharlal Nehru


Lots of folks confuse bad management with destiny. -Kin Hubbard





Failure and success seem to have been allotted to men by their stars. But they retain the power of wriggling, of fighting with their star or against it, and in the whole universe the only really interesting movement is this wriggle. -E.M. Forester


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





There’s much to be said for challenging fate instead of ducking behind it. -Diana Trilling


He that is born to be hanged shall never be drowned. -Author Unknown


Fate laughs at probabilities. -Edward George Earle Bulwer-Lytton


They... who await
No gifts from Chance, have conquered Fate.
-Matthew Arnold, "Resignation," 1849


A door that seems to stand open must be a man’s size, or it is not the door that Providence means for him. -Henry Ward Beecher


A person often meets his destiny on the road he took to avoid it. -Jean de La Fontaine





We cannot bear to regard ourselves simply as playthings of blind chance; we cannot admit to feeling ourselves abandoned. -Ugo Betti, Struggle till Dawn, 1949


You know that saying, that when God closes a door he opens a window, well, sometimes out of nowhere he’ll do you one better and he’ll kick a whole wall down. -Glee, "Furt" (season 2, episode 8, original airdate November 23, 2010), written by Ryan Murphy, Brad Falchuk, and Ian Brennan, spoken by the character Burt Hummel


Accept the things to which fate binds you and love the people with whom fate brings you together, and do so with all your heart. -Marcus Aurelius


Amor Fati – "Love Your Fate," which is in fact your life. -Friedrich Nietzsche


Sometimes what we believe as coincidence is really just getting ourselves caught in an angel booby trap. -Terri Guillemets





The pulse of destiny still shook the foundations of the world. The will that had willed this thing to happen had now another will to deal with—nor should the stream of Fate swallow up his heart without a cry. -Frederic Jesup Stimson, In Cure of Her Soul, 1906, wording slightly altered


There is an unseen life that dreams us. It knows our true direction and destiny. We can trust ourselves more than we realize and we need have no fear of change. -John O’Donohue


Again, you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life. -Steve Jobs





Destiny = our free will + God’s free will -Terri Guillemets


Fate is like a strange, unpopular restaurant, filled with odd waiters who bring you things you never asked for and don’t always like. -Lemony Snicket




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


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


Whose madness was a challenge hurled at fate... -Edgar Fawcett, "At a Window," Songs of Doubt and Dream, 1891


Fate loves the fearless. -James Russell Lowell


If you do not do what you are supposed to do in life, the universe will do it for you. -Kim Russo, "The Haunting Of… Meat Loaf" (original airdate 2015 October 22nd, season 4, episode 20)


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





And yet—and yet—ah, who understands?
We men and women are complex things!
A hundred tunes Fate's inexorable hands
May play on the sensitive soul-strings.
-Amy Levy, "In a Minor Key (An Echo from a Larger Lyre)," c.1884


A man does not make his destiny: he accepts it or denies it. -Ursula K. Le Guin


No destiny attacks us from outside. But, within him, man bears his fate and there comes a moment when he knows himself vulnerable; and then, as in a vertigo, blunder upon blunder lures him. -Antoine de Saint-Exupéry


You are fate’s shadow or fate’s sun, depending on which way you turn. -Terri Guillemets


I have a wife, I have sons: all of them hostages given to fate. -Lucan


The place you are right now
God circled on a map for you.
-Hāfez


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. -W.B. Yeats


[O]ne of my favorite Sufi poems... says that God long ago drew a circle in the sand exactly around the spot where you are standing right now. I was never not coming here. This was never not going to happen. -Elizabeth Gilbert


O! I am fortune’s fool. -William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet


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. -Charlotte Brontë


Life calls the tune, we dance. - John Galsworthy


When an inner situation is not made conscious it appears outside as fate. -Carl Jung





No man ever wetted clay and then left it, as if there would be bricks by chance and fortune. -Plutarch


Now is the dramatic moment of fate, Watson, when you hear a step upon the stair which is walking into your life, and you know not whether for good or ill. -Arthur Conan Doyle


I am alone this evening... because of a cruel twist of fate, a phrase which here means that nothing has happened the way I thought it would. Once I was a content man, with a comfortable home, a successful career, a person I loved very much, and an extremely reliable typewriter, but all of those things have been taken away from me.... As I sit in this very tiny room, printing these words with a very large pencil, I feel as if my whole life has been nothing but a dismal play, presented just for someone else’s amusement, and that the playwright who invented my cruel twist of fate is somewhere far above me, laughing and laughing at his creation. -Lemony Snicket


I shall seize fate by the throat. -Ludwig van Beethoven








What is called chance is the instrument of Providence... -Horace Walpole, 1777 letter to Countess of Ossory


Chance is a nickname of Providence. -Sébastien-Roch Nicolas (Chamfort) (c.1740–1794), translated from French


Chance is perhaps the pseudonym of God when he does not want to sign. -Théophile Gautier, c.1845, translated from French


Coincidence is God's way of remaining anonymous. -Charlotte Clemensen Taylor, 1986   [Previous "remain anonymous" versions by other authors had been circulating since at least 1976. —tεᖇᖇ¡·g]