D is for DESTINY

Books have their own destiny. [Lat., Habent sua fata libelli.]

Maurus Terentianus, Poetics





Alas! we are the sport of destiny.

William Makepeace Thackeray





We bear each one our own destiny.
[Lat., Quisque suos patimur manes.]


Virgil or Vergil (Publius Virgilius Maro Vergil), The Aeneid (VI, 743)

The seed ye sow, another reaps;

The wealth ye find, another keeps;

The robes ye weave, another wears;

The arms ye forge, another bears.

Percy Bysshe Shelley

And from his ashes may be made

The violet of his native land.

Lord Alfred Tennyson.

We are but as the instrument of heaven.


Owen Meredith (pseudonym of Edward Robert Bulwer Lytton, Lord Lytton)













Every man meets his Waterloo at last.


Wendell Phillips, Speech






Let Hercules himself do what he may,
The cat will mew, and dog will have his day.


William Shakespeare, Hamlet Prince of Denmark (Hamlet at V, i)








No living man can send me to the shades
Before my time; no man of woman born,
Coward or brave, can shun his destiny.

Homer ("Smyrns of Chios"), The Iliad






All, soon or late, are doom'd that path to tread.


Homer ("Smyrns of Chios"), The Odyssey





That old miracle
Love-at-first-sight
Needs no explanations.
The heart reads aright
Its destiny sometimes.


Owen Meredith (pseudonym of Edward Robert Bulwer Lytton, Lord Lytton)








Destiny is always dark.

George Herbert




Each thing, both in small and in great, fulfilleth the task which destiny hath set down.


Hippocrates of Iphicrates




That each thing, both in small and in great, fulfilleth the task which destiny hath set down.


Hippocrates of Iphicrates








Woman is born for love, and it is impossible to turn her from seeking it.

Margaret Fuller (Sarah Margaret Fuller Ossoli)




Man supposes that he directs his life and governs his actions, when his existence is irretrievably under the control of destiny.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe



Character is fate. (Destiny)

Heraclitus of Ephesus






There are certain events which to each man's life are as comets to the earth, seemingly strange and erratic portents; distinct from the ordinary lights which guide our course and mark our seasons, yet true to their own laws, potent in their own influences.

Edward George Earle Lytton Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton

For I am a weed,
Flung from the rock, on Ocean's foam, to sail,
Where'er the surge may sweep, the tempest's breath prevail.

Lord Byron (George Gordon Noel Byron), Childe Harold (canto III, st. 2)



Do not seek to have events happen as you want them to, but instead want them to happen as they do happen, and your life will go well.

Epictetus







My death and life,
My bane and antidote, are both before me.

Joseph Addison, Cato (act V, sc. 1)



For rarely man escapes his destiny.
[It., Che l'uomo il suo destin fugge di raro.]

Ludovico Ariosto, Orlando Furioso (XVIII, 58)



Life treads on life, and heart on heart;
We press too close in church and mart
To keep a dream or grave apart.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Vision of Poets (conclusion)