Quotes about fate

Who you get, and how it works out - there's so much luck involved, as well as the million branching consequences of your unconscious choice of mate, that no one and no amount of talking can untangle it if it turns out unhappily.

We don't become geisha because we want our lives to be happy; we become geisha because we have no choice.

We lead our lives like water flowing down a hill, going more or less in one direction until we splash into something that forces us to find a new course.

It was as though some stubborn god spent their time in an immutable and absurd balancing act between life and death, prosperity and poverty.

When we serve the great, they are our destiny.

Go with your fate, but not beyond. Beyond leads to dark places.

Your life is set upon you like a dog.

If people knew the story of their lives how many would then elect to live them?

You do not know what things you set in motion, he said. No man can know. No prophet foresee. The consequences of an act are often quite different from what one would guess. You must be sure that the intention in your heart is large enough to contain all wrong turnings, all disappointments. Do you see? Not everything has such value.

He said that both views were one view and that while men may meet with death in strange and obscure places which they might well have avoided it was more correct to say that no matter how hidden or crooked the path to their destruction yet they would seek it out. He smiled. He spoke as one who seemed to understand that death was the condition of existence and life but an emanation thereof.

The sense of tragedy is that the world is not a pleasant little nest made for our protection, but a vast and largely hostile environment, in which we can achieve great things only by defying the gods; and that this defiance inevitably brings its own punishment.

Destiny isn’t taken in by people trying to make what came first come afterwards.