Destiny

Fate is the friend of the good, the guide of the wise, the tyrant of the foolish, the enemy of the bad.
~ William Rounseville (W.R.) Alger

Wherever human beings meet, the bazaar of Fate stands open.
~ William Rounseville (W.R.) Alger, The Friendships of Women (1868). The Needs and Duties of Woman in This Age

The world is full of people who have missed their destiny because they would not pay the price. No one can take the easy way and enter into any kind of glory or greatness.
~ William Barclay

I was always willing to say, "Let's see what happens," when something came up that looked like it might help me get a little closer to where I wanted to be . . .
~ William James "Count" Basie, Good Morning Blues: The Autobiography of Count Basie (1985).

On the edge of destiny, you must test your strength.
~ Billy Bishop

Destiny is not a matter of chance; it is a matter of choice; it is not a thing to be waited for, it is a thing to be achieved.
~ William Jennings Bryan, Speech before the Virginia Democractic Association, Washington DC (22 February 1899). America's Mission

Man foretells afar
The courses of the stars; the very hour
He knows when they shall darken or grow bright;
Yet doth the eclipse of Sorrow and of Death
Come unforewarned.
~ William Cullen Bryant, An Evening Revery

These struggling tides of life that seem
In wayward, aimless course to tend,
Are eddies of the mighty stream
That rolls to its appointed end.
~ William Cullen Bryant

If anything good is to come out of the cause for which the Columbia astronauts died, it should be a resolve that it is humanity's destiny to inhabit Earth orbit, the moon and beyond.
~ William E. Burrows, The San Jose Mercury News (4 February 2003). William Burrows: Internal tug-of-war hobbles space program

Life's wind speeds on, but we are bound
By memory to our quiet state,
And sleep in solitude profound,
Within the caverns of our fate.
~ William Ellery Channing, the younger

My sin and my judgment are alike peculiar. I am a castaway, deserted and condemned.
~ William Cowper, (1773).

'Tis Providence alone secures
In every change both mine and yours.
~ William Cowper, A Fable. Moral

You are fated to have a sense of humor.
~ William F. Fry, Jr., MD

See how the Fates their gifts allot.
For A is happy -- B is not.
Yet B is worthy, I dare say
Of more prosperity than A!
~ William Schwenck (W.S.) Gilbert, The Mikado (1885 opera).

The religious man, who believes that all events, mental as well as physical, are pre-ordered and arranged according to the decrees of infinite wisdom, and the philosopher, who knows that, by the wise and eternal laws of the universe cause and effect are indissolubly chained together, and that one follows the other in inevitable succession, equally feel that this ordination -- this chain cannot he changed at the cry of man. To suppose that it can is to place the whole harmonious system of nature at the mercy of the weak reason and the selfish wishes of humanity.
~ William Rathbone (W.R.) Greg, The Creed of Christendom (1848). Christian Eclecticism

It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate;
I am the captain of my soul.
~ William Ernest (W.E.) Henley, Invictus: In Memoriam R.T. Hamilton Bruce (1888).

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

We are spinning our own fates, good or evil, and never to be undone. Every smallest stroke of virtue or of vice leaves its never-so-little scar.
~ William James, Talks to Teachers on Psychology: and to Students on Some of Life's Ideals (March 1899). VIII. The Laws of Habit

How fleet is Air! How many Things have Breath
Which in a Moment, they resign to Death;
Depriv'd of Light, and all their happiest State,
Not by their Fault, but some o'er-ruling Fate!
~ William King, Mully of Mountown (1704).

That which you vividly imagine, sincerely believe, ardently desire and enthusiastically act upon will inevitably come to pass.
~ William R. Lucas

Accept your fate as the stream accepts the stream bed. The bed forms the stream; the stream forms the bed.
~ William Markiewicz, Extracts of Existence (1990).

Your destiny is not always the one you seek, but always the one that finds you.
~ William Markiewicz, Extracts of Existence (1990).

I have an idea that some men are born out of their due places. Accident has cast them amid certain surroundings, but they have always a nostalgia for a home they know not. They are strangers in their birthplace, and the leafy lanes they have known from childhood or the populous streets in which they have played, remain but a place of passage. They may spend their whole lives aliens among their kindred and remain aloof among the only, scenes they have ever known. Perhaps it is this sense of strangeness that sends men far and wide in the search for something permanent, to which they may attach themselves.
~ W. Somerset Maugham, The Moon and Sixpence (1919).

The illusion of free will is so strong in my mind that I can't get away from it, but I believe it is only an illusion. But it is an illusion which is one of the strongest motives of my actions. Before I do anything feel that I have choice, and that influences what I do; but afterwards, when the thing is done, I believe that it was inevitable from all eternity.
~ W. Somerset Maugham, Of Human Bondage (1915).

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

To deny free will is to make mankind nothing but driftwood on the inexorable river of fate, and how we jostle one another is beyond our power to help.
~ J.A. McWilliams, Philosophy for the Millions (1942).

Having your fate rest in the hands of a jury is the same as entrusting yourself to surgery with a mentally retarded doctor.
~ Bill Messing, quoted in Dream World.

But thou, vast outbound ship of souls,
What harbor town for thee?
What shapes, when thy arriving tolls,
Shall crowd the banks to see?
Shall all the happy shipmates then
Stand singing brotherly?
Or shall a haggard ruthless few
Warp her over and bring her to,
While the many broken souls of men
Fester down in the slaver's pen,
And nothing to say or do?
~ William Vaughn Moody, from Poems (1901). Gloucester Moors

One hears but one does not seek; one takes -- one does not ask who gives; a thought flashes up like lightning, it comes of necessity and unfalteringly formed.
~ Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, Ecce Homo (1888).

Our destiny exercises its influence over us even when, as yet, we have not learned its nature: it is our future that lays down the law of our today.
~ Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human (1878).

. . . all the labours of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of Man's achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins -- all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain, that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand. Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul's habitation henceforth be safely built.
~ Bertrand Arthur William Russell, The Free Man's Worship (1903).

[I]t seems to be the fate of idealists to obtain what they have struggled for in a form which destroys their ideals.
~ Bertrand Arthur William Russell, Marriage and Morals (1929). VII: The Liberation of Women

An admirable evasion of whoremaster man, to lay his goatish disposition on the charge of a star!
~ William Shakespeare, King Lear. Act I, scene ii

Didst thou never hear
That things ill got had ever bad success?
~ William Shakespeare, King Henry VI, Part III. Act II, scene ii

Fate, show your force; ourselves we do not owe.
What is decreed must be -- and be this so!
~ William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night. Act I, scene v

If chance will have me king, why, chance may crown me.
~ William Shakespeare, Macbeth. Act I, scene iii

The ancient saying is no heresy;
Hanging and wiving goes by destiny.
~ William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice. Act II, scene ix

Who can control his fate?
~ William Shakespeare, Othello. Act V, scene ii

That that is, is.
~ William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night. Act IV, scene ii

There's a divinity that shapes our ends,
Rough-hew them how we will.
~ William Shakespeare, Hamlet. Act V, scene ii

If you employed study, thinking, and planning time daily, you could develop and use the power that can change the course of your destiny.
~ William (W.) Clement Stone

But Fate is stronger than all of us, and willed what has come to pass.
~ William Makepeace Thackeray, The History of Henry Esmond (1852). Book II. Chapter I: I Am In Prison, And Visited, But Not Consoled There

If you do not create your destiny, you will have your fate inflicted upon you.
~ William Irwin Thompson, Pacific Shift (1986).

I am not an adventurer by choice but by fate.
~ Vincent Willem van Gogh, in The Complete Letters of Vincent Van Gogh, vol. 2 (1958). Letter of Summer 1886

I know not what our fate may be:
I only know that he who hath a time
Must also have eternity.
~ William Ross Wallace, from Meditations in America, and Other Poems (1851). The Chant of a Soul

There is no chance, no destiny, no fate,
Can circumvent or hinder or control
The firm resolve of a determined soul.
Gifts count for nothing; will alone is great;
All things give way before it, soon or late.
~ Ella Wheeler Wilcox, from Maurine and Other Poems (1888). Will

There is no fate:
Thy high or low estate
Comes of thy climbing or thy falling down.
~ Theodore Chickering Williams, from Poems of Belief (1910). The Free Spirit

If there was ever a man born to be a hitter it was me.
~ Theodore Samuel ("Ted") Williams

We are only mortal
but being mortal
can defy our fate.
We may
by an outside chance
even win!
~ William Carlos Williams, from Journey to Love (1955). The Ivy Crown

And stepping westward seemed to be
A kind of heavenly destiny.
~ William Wordsworth, Stepping Westward

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting;
The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar.
~ William Wordsworth, from Poems in Two Volumes (1807). Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood

Whether we be young or old,
Our destiny, our being's heart and home,
Is with infinitude, and only there;
With hope it is, hope that can never die,
Effort and expectation, and desire,
And something evermore about to be.
~ William Wordsworth, The Prelude (1805).

Ye call the law of your own fate
Rough to the feet, unfriendly, cold;
But if the heart be free and bold,
It turns to beautiful and great.
~ William Bull Wright, in An American Anthology, 1787-1900 (1900). From "The Brook"

I write it out in a verse --
MacDonagh and MacBride
And Connolly and Pearse
Now and in time to be,
Wherever green is worn,
Are changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.
~ William Butler Yeats, from Michael Robartes and the Dancer (1921). Easter, 1916.