There is no fate that cannot be surmounted¹ by scorn.

Albert Camus (1913 - 1960)

To punish me for my contempt for authority, fate made me an authority myself.

Albert Einstein (1879 - 1955)

If you can't change your fate, change your attitude.

Amy Tan (1952 - )

Men are not prisoners of fate, but only prisoners of their own minds.

Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882 - 1945), Pan American Day address, April 15, 1939

I do not believe in a fate that falls on all men however they act; but I do believe in a fate that falls on them unless they act.

G. K. Chesterton (1874 - 1936), On Holland, Generally Speaking, 1928

I do not believe in a fate that falls on men however they act; but I do believe in a fate that falls on them unless they act.

G. K. Chesterton (1874 - 1936), Generally Speaking, Chapter 20, 1929

A man's character is his fate.

Heraclitus (540 BC - 480 BC), On the Universe

The fates have given mankind a patient soul.

Homer (800 BC - 700 BC), The Iliad

Talent and intelligence never yet inoculated² anyone against the caprice of the fates.

J. K. Rowling, Harvard Commencement Address, 2008

Fate chooses your relations, you choose your friends.

Jacques Delille

'If it’s meant for me, it will be.' Those words are my mantra in life, and it has never let me down.

Jennifer Hudson, I Got This: How I Changed My Ways and Lost What Weighed Me Down, 2012

Man is his own star and the soul that can render an honest and perfect man commands all light, all influence, all fate.

John Fletcher (1579 - 1625), 1647

That consciousness is everything and that all things begin with a thought. That we are responsible for our own fate, we reap what we sow, we get what we give, we pull in what we put out. I know these things for sure.

Madonna (1958 - ), O Magazine, January 2004

Maybe our mistakes are what make our fate. Without them, what would shape our lives? Perhaps, if we never veered³ off course, we wouldn't fall in love or have babies or be who we are.

Michael Patrick King, Sex and the City, I Heart NY, 2002

Naming one thing after another cannot, logically, increase the chances of the new thing turning out like the old thing.

Ned Beauman, The Teleportation Accident, 2013

Whatever limits us, we call Fate.

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803 - 1882), Fate, The Conduct of Life, 1860

Fate rules the affairs of mankind with no recognizable order.

Seneca (5 BC - 65 AD)

While the fates permit, live happily; life speeds on with hurried step, and with winged days the wheel of the headlong year is turned.

Seneca (5 BC - 65 AD)

I am not an adventurer by choice but by fate.

Vincent van Gogh (1853 - 1890)

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

William McFee

Men at some time are the masters of their fates: The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves, that we are underlings.

William Shakespeare (1564 - 1616), Julius Caesar, Act I, sc. 2