This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"We create our fortune, for so the universe was wrought. Thought is another name for fate; choose they your destiny and wait, for love brings love, and hate brings hate." - Henry Van Dyke
"Be still, sad heart, and cease repining, behind the clouds the sun is shining; thy fate is the common fate of all; into each life some rain must fall, - some days must be dark and dreary." - Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
"Let us, then, be up and doing, With a heart for any fate; Still achieving, still pursuing, Learn to labor and to wait." - Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
"Thy fate is the common fate of all; into each life some rain must fall." - Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
"Trouble is the next best thing to enjoyment; there is no fate in the world so horrible as to have no share in either its joys or sorrows." - Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
"All are architects of fate, working in these walls of Time; some with massive deed and great, some with ornaments of rhyme. Nothing useless is, or low; each thing in its place is best; and what seems idle show strengthens and supports the rest. For the structure that we raise, time is with materials filled; our todays and yesterdays are the blocks with which we build. Truly shape and fashion these; leaving no yawning gaps between; think not, because no man sees, such things will remain unseen." - Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
"Tell me not in mournful numbers, life is but an empty dream! For the soul is dead that slumbers, and things are not what they seem. Life is real! Life is earnest! And the grave is not its goal; dust thou art, to dust returneth, was not spoken of the soul. Not enjoyment, and not sorrow is our destined end or way; but to act, that each to-morrow find us farther than today... Trust no Future, howe’er pleasant! Let the dead Past bury its dead! Act - act in the living Present! Hear within, and God o’erhead. Lives of great men all remind us we can make our lives sublime, and, departing, leave behind us footprints in the sands of time... Let us then, be up and doing, with a heart for any fate; still achieving, still pursuing, learn to labor and to wait." - Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
"A man's character is his fate." - Heraclitus or Heraclitus of Ephesus NULL
"There is no Fate that plans men's lives. Whatever comes to us, good or bad, is usually the result of our own action or lack of action." - Herbert Newton Casson
"Fate is the same for the man who holds back, the same if he fights hard. We are all held in a single honor, the brave with the weaklings. A man dies still if he has done nothing, as one who has done much." - Homer NULL
"Men do not attract that which they want, but that which they are... The “divinity that shapes our ends” is in ourselves, it is our very self. Man is manacled only by himself: thought and action are the jailers of Fate - they imprison, being base; they are also the angels of Freedom - they liberate, being noble. Not what a man wishes and prays for does a man get, but what he justly earns." -
"Anti-Semitism, in a word, is fear of man's fate. The anti-Semite is the man who wants to be a pitiless stone, a furious torrent, devastating lightning: in short, anything but a man." - Jean-Paul Sartre
"God made thee perfect, not immutable; and good he made thee, but to persevere he left it in thy power, ordained thy will by nature free, not over-rul’d by Fate inextricable, or strict necessity; our voluntarie service he requires, not our necessitated, such with him findes no acceptance, nor can find, for how can hearts, not free, be tri’d whether they serve willing or not, who will but what they must by Destinie, and can no other choose?" - John Milton
"No peace was ever won from fate by subterfuge or agreement; no peace is ever in store for any of us, but that which we shall win by victory over shame or sin - victory over the sin that oppresses, as well as over that which corrupts." - John Ruskin
"No peace was ever won from fate by subterfuge or argument; no peace is ever in store for any of us, but that which we shall win by victory over shame or sin - victory over the sin that oppresses, as well as over that which corrupts." - John Ruskin
"Fate and necessity are unconquerable." - Joseph Joubert
"The world is not divine play, it is divine fate. They that are the world, man, the human person, you and I, has divine meaning. Creation - happens to us, burns into us, changes us, we tremble and swoon, we submit. Creation - we participate in it, we encounter the creator, offer ourselves to Him, helpers and companions." - Martin Buber
"The heart is its own fate." - Philip James Bailey
"In human life there is a constant change of fortune; and it is unreasonable to expect an exemption from the common fate. Life itself decays, and all things are daily changing." - Plutarch, named Lucius Mestrius Plutarchus after becoming Roman citizen NULL
"Fate is unpenetrated causes." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"If we must accept fate, we are not less compelled to assert liberty, the significance of the individual, the grandeur of duty, the power of character. We are sure, though we know not how, that necessity does comport with liberty, the individual with the world, my polarity with the spirit of the times." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"If you believe in fate, believe in it, at least, for you good." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Intellect annuls fate. So far as a man thinks, he is free." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Whatever limits us we call Fate." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"‘Tis weak and vicious people who cast the blame on fate." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"If we must accept Fate, we are no less compelled to affirm liberty, the significance of the individual, the grandeur of duty, the power of character." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Intellect annuls fate. So far as a man thinks, he is free." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"The bitterest tragic element in life is the belief in a brute fate or destiny." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"It is the customary fate of new truths to begin as heresies and to end as superstitions." - Thomas Henry Huxley, aka T.H. Huxley and Darwin's Bulldog
"History warns us that it is the customary fate of new truths to begin as heresies and to end as superstitions." - Thomas Henry Huxley, aka T.H. Huxley and Darwin's Bulldog
"Growing old is one of the ways the soul nudges itself into attention to the spiritual aspect of life. The body's changes teach us about fate, time, nature, mortality, and character. Aging forces us to decide what is important in life." - Thomas Moore
"The ending of a relationship is as mysterious as its beginning... We tend to look for rational causes and to blame one of the parties for committing the crime of ending. Fate and its important relationship to the soul are forgotten... The soul in a relationship is not only contained in each individual, it is also contained in the relationship itself." - Thomas Moore
"To be an object of hatred and aversion to their contemporaries has been the usual fate of all those whose merit has raised them above the common level. The man who submits to the shafts of envy for the sake of noble objects pursues a judicious course for his own lasting fame. Hatred dies with its object, while merit soon breaks forth in full splendor, and his glory is handed down to posterity in never-dying strains." - Thucydides NULL
"An active life serves the purpose of giving man the opportunity to realize values in creative work, while a passive life of enjoyment affords him the opportunity to obtain fulfillment in experiencing beauty, art, or nature. But there is also purpose in that life which is almost barren of both creation and enjoyment and which admits of but one possibility of behavior: namely, in man's attitude to this existence, an existence restricted by external forces. A creative life and a life of enjoyment are banned to him. But not only creativeness and enjoyment are meaningful. If there is a meaning in life at all, then there must be a meaning in suffering. Suffering is an ineradicable part of life, even as fate as death. Without suffering and death human life cannot be complete." -
"If we should venture to name this deep-set desire which we call religious it might be represented as an ultimate demand for self-preservation; it is man’s leap for eternal life in some form, in presence of an awakened fear of fate." - William Ernest Hocking
"Fate is the friend of the good, the guide of the wise, the tyrant of the foolish, the enemy of the bad." - William Rounseville Alger
"The slave is doomed to worship Time and Fate and Death, because they are greater than anything he finds in himself, and because all his thoughts are of things which they devour. But, great as they are, to think of them greatly, to feel their passionless splendor, is greater still. And such thought makes us free men." - Bertrand Russell, fully Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell
"Losing your way on a journey is unfortunate. But, losing your reason for the journey is a fate more cruel." - H. G. Wells, fully Herbert George Wells
"I believe it is the duty of each of us to act as if the fate of the world depended on him. Admittedly, one man by himself cannot do the job. However, one man can make a difference... We must live for the future of the human race, and not for our own comfort or success." - Hyman George Rickover
"Our fate is shaped from within ourselves outward, never from without inward." - Jacques Lusseyran
"Men do not attract that which they want, but that which they are... The “divinity that shapes our ends” is in ourselves, it is our very self. Man is manacled only by himself: thought and action are the jailers of Fate - they imprison, being base; they are also the angels of Freedom - they liberate, being noble. Not what a man wishes and prays for does a man get, but what he justly earns." - James Allen
"The Hebrews have done more to civilize men than any other nation. If I were an atheist, and believed blind eternal fate, I should still believe that fate had ordained the Jews to be the most essential instrument for civilizing the nations. " - John Adams
"When we say that the persistence of competition is ensured by fate, we mean that individual freedom is so guaranteed. The one thing to which fate binds us is liberty." - John Bates Clark
"Does man exist for the sake of society? The ultimate worth of a person would then be determined by his usefulness to others, by the efficiency of his social work.... Such service does not claim all of one’s life and can therefore not be the ultimate answer to his quest for the meaning of life as a whole. Man has more to give than what other men are able or willing to accept. Man’s quest for a meaning of existence is essentially a quest for lasting... The way to the lasting does not lie on the other side of life; it does not begin where time breaks off. The lasting begins not beyond but within time, within the moment, within the concrete... The days of our lives are representatives of eternity rather than fugitives, and we must live as if the fate of all time would totally depend on a single moment." - Abraham Joshua Heschel
"Modern man’s discovery of the fundamental aloneness and solitude in a universe indifferent to his fate is due to an expectation that it was in the universe where care for what is ultimately precious was to be found. He now suffers from the collapse of naïve self-deception and oversimplification. Our era marks the end of simplification, the end of personal exclusiveness, the end of self-defense through aloofness, the end of a sense of security. " - Abraham Joshua Heschel
"If there were nothing else to trouble us, the fate of the flowers would make us sad." - John Lancaster Spalding
"It is the common fate of the indolent to see their rights become a prey to the active. The condition upon which God hath given liberty to man is eternal vigilance; which condition if he break, servitude is at once the consequence of his crime and the punishment of his guilt. " - John Philpot Curran
"We may become the makers of our fate when we have ceased to pose as its prophets." - Karl Popper, fully Sir Karl Raimund Popper
"Of all created things the source is one, Simple, single as love remember The cell and seed of life, the sphere That is, of child, white bird, and small blue dragon-fly Green fern, and the gold four-petalled tormentilla The ultimate memory. Each latent cell puts out a future, Unfolds its differing complexity As a tree puts forth leaves, and spins a fate Fern-traced, bird feathered, or fish-scaled." - Kathleen Raine