Quote Worthy

What is not started today is never finished tomorrow. - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Each decision we make, each action we take, is born out of an intention. -Sharon Salzberg

Men keep agreements when it is to the advantage of neither to break them. - Solon

A great empire, like a great cake, is most easily diminished at the edges. - Benjamin Franklin

He that is good for making excuses is seldom good for anything else. - Benjamin Franklin

A false friend and a shadow stay around only while the sun shines. - Benjamin Franklin

One never goes so far as when one doesn’t know where one is going. - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

It is not so much what a person says, but what makes him say it. - Karl G. Maeser

People with courage and character always seem sinister to the rest. - Hermann Hesse

A man is insensible to the relish of prosperity 'til he has tasted adversity. - Sa'Di

Horses - Quotes

A horse never runs so fast as when he has other horses to catch up and outpace. - Ovid

A man may well bring a horse to the water but he cannot make him drink. - John Heywood

All lay loads on a willing horse. - Unknown

Better lose the saddle than the horse. - Unknown

Every horse thinks its own pack heaviest. - Thomas Fuller

It is not best to swap horses while crossing the river. - Abraham Lincoln

It is too late to shut the stable after the horse is stolen. - Unknown

Never mind whether the horse is blind or not, just load up the wagon. - Stephen Boyd

Never swap horses crossing a stream. - American Proverb 

One may lead a horse, but twenty cannot make it drink. - Unknown

The burden is equal to the horse’s strength. - Unknown

The spirited horse, which will try to win the race of its own accord, will run ever faster if encouraged. - Ovid 

The wildest colts make the best horses. - Plutarch

Family - Quotes

A family in harmony will prosper in everything. - Chinese Proverb

A family needs to work as a team, supporting each other's individual aims and aspirations. - Buzz Aldrin

A family with an old person has a living treasure of gold. - Chinese Proverb

A happy family is but an earlier heaven. - George Bernard Shaw

All happy families resemble each other, each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. - Leo Tolstoy

All parents damage their children. It cannot be helped. Youth, like pristine glass, absorbs the prints of its handlers. Some parents smudge, others crack, a few shatter childhoods completely into jagged little pieces, beyond repair. - Mitch Albom

As the family goes, so goes the nation and so goes the whole world in which we live. - John Paul II

Better a loving single-parent family than a 'conventional' family where the parents hate each other and the father is a demagogue. - Moby

Bringing up a family should be an adventure, not an anxious discipline in which everybody is constantly graded for performance. - Milton R. Saperstein

Every family has a story that it tells itself, that it passes on to the children and grandchildren. The story grows over the years, mutates, some parts are sharpened, others dropped, and there is often debate about what really happened. But even with these different sides of the same story, there is still agreement that this is the family story. And in the absence of other narratives, it becomes the flagpole that the family hangs its identity from. - A. M Homes

Families are messy. Immortal families are eternally messy. Sometimes the best we can do is to remind each other that we’re related for better or for worse… and try to keep the maiming and killing to a minimum. - Rick Riorda

Families are the compass that guides us. They are the inspiration to reach great heights, and our comfort when we occasionally falter. - Brad Henry
Families aren't easy to join. They're like an exclusive country club where membership makes impossible demands and the dues for an outsider are exorbitant. - Erma Bombeck

Families ties are cherished things, forged in childhood days, by love of parents, deep and true, and sweet familiar ways. - Terri Burritt

Families, doing everything for each other out of imagined obligation and always getting in each other's way, what a tangle. - John Updike

Family – like branches on a tree, we all grow in different directions yet our roots remain as one. - Unknown

Family is the most important thing in the world. - Princess Diana

Family is what grounds you. - Angelina Jolie

Family isn't something that’s supposed to be static, or set. People marry in, divorce out. They’re born, they die. It’s always evolving, turning into something else. - Sarah Dessen

Family life contributes immensely to an individual’s happiness. Only in a happy home life can complete contentment be found. - Dorothea S. Koppliln

Family means no one gets left behind or forgotten. - David Ogden Stiers

Family quarrels are bitter things. They don’t go according to any rules. They’re not like aches or wounds; they’re more like splits in the skin that won’t heal because there’s not enough material. - F. Scott Fitzgerald

Family traditions counter alienation and confusion. They help us define who we are; they provide something steady, reliable and safe in a confusing world. - Susan Lieberman

Feelings of worth can flourish only in an atmosphere where individual differences are appreciated, mistakes are tolerated, communication is open, and rules are flexible -- the kind of atmosphere that is found in a nurturing family. - Virginia Satir

Forms of family life vary from one society to another. There are no universal rules about who is considered to be "in" a family, who lives with whom, who is socially allowed to have sex with whom, who shares economic resources and who has responsibility for children. - Marilyn Poole

If the family were a boat, it would be a canoe that makes no progress unless everyone paddles. - Letty Cottin Pogrebin

If the world around us is chaotic and sometimes incomprehensible, then the family is an oasis, an anchor of reliability and loyalty, a place where we are important because we are there. - Susan Lieberman

In one family, every little plan or question is discussed amid bickering and irritation. In another, without the least effort, every discussion goes on amid perfect peace. This is just as easy, and infinitely more agreeable: only, in many homes it does not happen to be the family habit. - Charles Buxton

In that family where the husband is pleased with his wife, and the wife with her husband, happiness will assuredly be lasting. - Brahma

In the family, happiness is in the ratio in which each is serving the others, seeking one another's good, and bearing one another's burdens. - Henry Ward Beecher

In truth, a family is what you make it. It is made strong, not by number of heads counted at the dinner table, but by the rituals you help family members create, by the memories you share, by the commitment of time, caring, and love you show to one another, and by the hopes for the future you have as individuals and as a unit. - Marge Kennedy

Love your family. Spend time, be kind and serve one another. Make no room for regrets. Tomorrow is not promised and today is short. - Unknown

Our family is like the branches of a tree. We may grow in different directions, yet our roots remain as one. - Unknown

Parents were the only ones obligated to love you; from the rest of the world you had to earn it. - Ann Brashares

People come and go in our lives, but a beauty of life is that our family is always there. - Catherine Pulsifer

Rejoice with your family in the beautiful land of life! - Albert Einstein

The bond that links your true family is not one of blood, but of respect and joy in each other's life. Rarely do members of one family grow up under the same roof. - Richard Bach

The family – that dear octopus from whose tentacles we never quite escape, nor, in our inmost hearts, ever quite wish to. - Dodie Smith

The family is an absolute monarchy in miniature. - Abraham Miller

The family is both the fundamental unit of society as well as the root of culture. It ... is a perpetual source of encouragement, advocacy, assurance, and emotional refueling that empowers a child to venture with confidence into the greater world and to become all that he can be. - Marianne E. Neifert

The family we choose for ourselves is more important than the one we were born into ... people have to earn our respect and trust, not have it handed to them simply because of genetics. - Charles de Lint

The family. We were a strange little band of characters trudging through life sharing diseases and toothpaste, coveting one another's desserts, hiding shampoo, borrowing money, locking each other out of our rooms, inflicting pain and kissing to heal it in the same instant, loving, laughing, defending, and trying to figure out the common thread that bound us all together. - Erma Bombeck

The informality of family life is a blessed condition that allows us to become our best while looking our worst. - Marge Kennedy

The most important thing in life is your family. There are days you love them, and others you don’t. But, in the end, they’re the people you always come home to. Sometimes it’s the family you’re born into and sometimes it’s the one you make for yourself. - Carrie

The number one need in all people is the need for acceptance, the need to experience a sense of belonging to something and someone. The need for acceptance is more powerful in your family than anywhere else.... If that need is not met by your family, trust me, your kids will go elsewhere to seek it in order to find approval and acceptance. - Phil McGraw

The strength of a family, like the strength of an army, is in its loyalty to each other. - Mario Puzo

The trouble with the family is that children grow out of childhood, but parents never grow out of parenthood. - Evan Esar

There are certain functions that the family performs. In the first place the family provides society with an orderly means of reproduction, while at the same time the norms of marriage control the potentially disruptive forces of sexuality. Second, the family provides physical and economic support for the child during the early years of dependence. The child receives its primary socialization in the family, learning the essential ideas and values required for adult life. - Adrian Wilson

There is an interconnectedness among members that bonds the family, much like mountain climbers who rope themselves together when climbing a mountain, so that if someone should slip or need support, he's held up by the others until he regains his footing. - Phil McGraw

There is no such thing as a perfect family. Behind every door there are issues, the difference is accepting and encouraging each family member as they are not as we would like them to be. - Catherine Pulsifer

There’s nothing that makes you more insane than family. Or more happy. Or more exasperated. Or more… secure. - Jim Butcher

This is part of what a family is about, not just love. It's knowing that your family will be there watching out for you. Nothing else will give you that. Not money. Not fame. Not work. - Mitch Albom

This was the trouble with families. Like invidious doctors, they knew just where it hurt. - Arundhati Roy

What greater thing is there for human souls than to feel that they are joined for life – to be with each other in silent unspeakable memories. - George Eliot

When a man is in love with one woman in a family, it is astonishing how fond he becomes of every person connected with it. - William Makepeace Thackeray

When any trouble comes in home, all family members takes it as its own and this is called family love. - Unknown

We all hold on to some image of the family we want, based one way or another on the family we had. Lots of people are thrilled about the families they came from, others couldn't get away fast enough. Most people fall into that vast middle ground: great affection mixed with a few ideas for improvement. A couple of things they wish could have perhaps been done differently. - Paul Reiser

Where love exists with self-respect and joy, where a fine environment is provided for the child, where the parents live under conditions that neither stunt the imagination nor let it run to uncontrolled fantasy, there you have the family that modern men are seeking to create. - Walter Lippmann

Woman is the salvation or destruction of the family. She carries its destinies in the folds of her mantle. - Henri-Frederic Amiel

Practice of Tao

What is essential to practice the Tao is to get rid of cravings and vexations. If these afflictions are not removed, it is impossible to attain stability. This is like the case of the fertile field, which cannot produce good crops as long as the weeds are not cleared away. Cravings and ruminations are the weeds of the mind; if you do not clear them away, concentration and wisdom do not develop. - Chang San-feng 

The Tao is supreme goodness. It has no form and is limitless. It is formless because there is no visible trace of its existence. The Tao is that energy that has existed from the beginning when there was neither structure nor differentiation. It is the source of life in heaven and on earth. It creates and end all things. - Shui-ch'ing Tzu

Riches, fame, and fortune are as ephemeral as lightning, The passion of sexual love and childish piety will vanish like flames. Do not crave and be the master of your own life, Cultivate the Tao and there will be gods to help your karma. Do not lose your original nature and the dust of the earthly realm will vanish, The sky will reveal the circular bright moon. - Shui-ch'ing Tzu

When the mortal mind is dead, the mind of Tao can live. - Shui-ch'ing Tzu

The Tao is near and people seek it far away. - Mencius

Quote Worthy

A man can do only what a man can do. But if he does that each day, he can sleep at night and do it again the next day. - Albert Schweitzer

You have your way. I have my way. As for the right way, the correct way, and the only way, it does not exist. - Friedrich Nietzsche

The things you want are always possible; it is just that the way to get them is not always apparent. - Les Brown

It is always safe to learn, even from our enemies; seldom safe to venture to instruct, even our friends. - Charles Colton  

How many legs does a dog have if you call the tail a leg? Four. Calling a tail a leg doesn’t make it a leg. - Abraham Lincoln

Education is when you read the fine print. Experience is what you get if you don’t. - Pete Seeger

If my doctor told me I had only six minutes to live, I wouldn’t brood. I’d type a little faster. - Isaac Asimov

Good tactics can save even the worst strategy. Bad tactics will destroy even the best strategy. - George S. Patton

Fantasy - Quotes

All you ever were was a little bit of the universe, thinking to itself. Very specific; this bit, here, right now. All the rest was fantasy. - Iain M. Banks

Fantasy is hardly an escape from reality. It’s a way of understanding it. - Lloyd Alexander

Fantasy is the only canvas large enough for me to paint on. - Terry Brooks

If you are going to write, say, fantasy – stop reading fantasy. You’ve already read too much. Read other things; read westerns, read history, read anything that seems interesting, because if you only read fantasy and then you start to write fantasy, all you’re going to do is recycle the same old stuff and move it around a bit. - Terry Pratchett

The problem with fantasy is the greatest benefit of fantasy: it prevents us from living in the present moment. - Geneen Roth

We don’t create a fantasy world to escape reality. We create it to be able to stay. - Lynda Barry

When I examine myself and my methods of thought I come to the conclusion that the gift of fantasy has meant more to me than my talent for absorbing positive knowledge. - Albert Einstein

You always start with a fantasy. Part of the fantasy technique is to visualize something as perfect. Then with the experiments you work back from the fantasy to reality, hacking away at the components. - Edwin H. Land

A Minute A penny

Smith climbs to the top of Mt. Sinai to get close enough to talk to God.  Looking up, he asks the Lord... "God, what does a million years mean to you?"

The Lord replies, "A minute."

Smith asks, "And what does a million dollars mean to you?"

The Lord replies, "A penny."

Smith asks, "Can I have a penny?"

The Lord replies, "In a minute."

Fashion - Quotes

A respectable appearance is sufficient to make people more interested in your soul. - Karl Lagerfeld

An air of fashion, which is but a badge of slavery ... proves that the soul has not a strong individual character. - Mary Wollstonecraft

A fashion is nothing but an induced epidemic. - George Bernard Shaw

Change of fashion is the tax levied by the industry of the poor on the vanity of the rich. - Nicolas Chamfort

Choose thy clothes by thine own eyes, not another's. - William Penn

Clothes and manners do not make the man; but, when he is made, they greatly improve his appearance. - Henry Ward Beecher

Do not conceive that fine clothes make fine men any more than fine feathers make fine birds. - George Washington

Every generation laughs at the old fashions, but follows religiously the new. - Henry David Thoreau

Every style seems completely appropriate to its epoch. We cannot imagine Madame de Pompadour, or the Empress Josephine, or the early Victorian lady in anything but the clothes she actually wore. Each represents completely the ideals of her time: elegant artificiality or post-Revolutionary morals, or the prudery of the rising middle class. - James Laver

Fashion ... has brought everything into vogue, by turns. - Charles Caleb Colton

Fashion ... is most capricious in her favours, often running from those that pursue her, and coming round to those that stand still. It was mad to follow her, and rash to oppose her, but neither rash nor mad to despise her. - Charles Caleb Colton

Fashion can be bought, style one must possess. - Unknown

Fashion is a mysterious chimera. Elegance, beauty and expense are no longer reliable guides to what is "cool". Outfits applauded on the runway often never make it to the stores.... Just as we get used to one "look", its counterpart comes into vogue. Why do we need or wish to consistently redefine and adorn ourselves? Who makes the rules and who breaks them? Fashion seems responsible for the mayhem, but it is also the creative source of an exciting and enormously profitable industry. - Sue Jenkyn Jones

Fashion is a sieve, and money spent on it as dust. - Edward Counsel

Fashion is all about who you are. It's about expressing your individuality and showing the world your personality. Fashion is not about looking like everyone else. So, stand out! - Laurie McElroy

Fashion is an inherent part of human social interaction and not the creation of an elite group of designers, producers, or marketers. Because of its basis in individual social comparison, fashion cannot be controlled without undermining its ultimate purpose, which is the expression of individual identity. If self-identity were never in doubt and social comparison never took place, there would be no demand for fashion, and there would be no need or opportunity for style change. - Aubrey Cannon

Fashion is capitalism's favourite child. - Werner Sombart

Fashion is conceived as irrational because it changes constantly, has no content, works as an external decoration, and carries no intellectual elements. - Yuniya Kawamura

Fashion is not something that exists in dresses only; fashion is something in the air. It's the wind that blows in the new fashion; you feel it coming, you smell it. Fashion is in the sky, in the street, fashion has to do with ideas, the way we live, what is happening. - Coco Chanel

Fashion is not style. Nay, we can say more: Fashion is instead of style. Style is an idiom springing spontaneously from the personality but deliberately maintained. If you have no personality, you may be able to save your face and, possibly, your entire anatomy by following the current fashion, but all we shall know about you, when we see you coming down the street, is that you had enough money to buy a glossy magazine and were sufficiently cunning to work out the cut of the garments shown therein. - Quentin Crisp

Fashion is not usually amenable to reason and common sense; argument, entreaty, ridicule, are each and all alike in turn powerless in the matter. - Pye Henry Chavasse

Fashion is nothing more than the temporary custom of rich and idle people who make it their principal business to study the external elegance of life. - Philip Gilbert Hamerton

Fashion is one of the great living arts of civilisation and self-decoration one of the fundamental human urges. - Janey Ironside

Fashion is socially reproductive, training us to be flexible and responsive to change in a fast-changing world. - Caroline Evans

Fashion is the great governor of this world; it presides, not only in matters of dress and amusement, but in law, physic, politics, religion, and all other things of the gravest kind; indeed, the wisest of men would be puzzled to give any better reason why particular forms in all these have been at certain times universally received, and at others universally rejected, than that they were in or out of fashion. - Henry Fielding

Fashion is unpredictable. Fashion changes overnight. Fashion is whimsy. - Michael E. Gerber

Fashion is what you adopt when you do not know who you are. - Unknown

Fashions change like leaves on the bough, some of which go and others come. - Dante Alighieri

Fashions fade, style is eternal. - Yves Saint Laurent

Feminist readings of fashion have often portrayed it as a kind of conspiracy to distract women from the real affairs of society, namely economics and politics. Fashion has been seen as a device for confining women to an inferior social order, largely because it demands an unequal expenditure of time and money by women on activities which do not attract the professional attention and efforts of men. Fashion works to intensify self-absorption and thereby reduces the social, cultural and intellectual horizons of women. - Joanne Finkelstein

I always believed that style was more important than fashion. They are rare, those who imposed their style while fashion makers are so numerous. - Yves Saint Laurent

If you ride a trend, make sure you can spot its tail. Many people failed because they did not see the impending change in trend. - Unknown

In dress, seek the middle between foppery and shabbiness. - Horace Mann

Ladies of Fashion starve their happiness to feed their vanity. - Charles Caleb Colton

Many-tinted are the eyes of fashion. - Edward Counsel

Mistrust all enterprises that require new clothes. - E. M. Forster

Oh, never mind the fashion. When one has a style of one's own, it is always 20 times better. - Margaret Oliphant

Over the years I have learned that what is important in a dress is the woman who is wearing it. - Yves Saint-Laurent

Over the years I have learned that what is important in a dress is the woman who is wearing it. - Yves Saint Laurent

Singularity in dress argues eccentricity of character. A queer cut of the coat represents a crotchet in the brain. - Christian Nestell Bovee

Ten years before its time, a fashion is indecent; ten years after, it is hideous; but a century after, it is romantic. - James Laver

The erogenous zone is always shifting, and it is the business of fashion to pursue it, without ever catching it up. - James Laver

The fashion industry is not interested in making women feel better about themselves. Fashion is about making people want something they are unlikely to get ... and any satisfaction achieved is fleeting and faintly disappointing. - Hadley Freeman

The fashion wears out more apparel than the man. - William Shakespear

The irrational aspect of fashion is very important; fashion provides a field for the expression of fetishistic and magical impulses and beliefs. - Elizabeth Wilson

The last person to adopt a ridiculous fashion suffers more derision than the one who first adopted it. - Lewis F. Korns

The perfection of dress lies in the union of three requisites: in its being comfortable, inexpensive, and in good taste. It should not be so far removed from the prevailing mode as to excite attention, nor yet so far within the fashion as to imply a weak submission to it. - Christian Nestell Bovee

There would not be so much harm in the giddy following the fashions, if somehow the wise could always set them. - Christian Nestell Bovee

Unlike art, the consumption of fashion is not based primarily on knowledge or education but functions through visual awareness, a type of sensuality and perception of the corporeal self. - Valerie Steele

Gifts - Quotes

A gift consists not in what is done or given, but in the intention of the giver or doer. - Seneca

A gift, with a kind countenance, is a double present. - Thomas Fuller

A pat on the back and a sympathetic ear are valuable gifts you can give to those you work, and live with. Times of crisis only increase their value. - Unknown

Anything that has real and lasting value is always a gift from within. - Franz Kafka

Every one has a gift for something, even if it is the gift of being a good friend. - Marian Anderson

Everyone is gifted – but some people never open their package. - Wolfgang Riebe

It is a gift to be simple. - Unknown

Love the giver more than the gift. - Brigham Young

Some people have a knack of putting upon you gifts of no real value, to engage you to substantial gratitude. We thank them for nothing. - Charles Lamb

The artist is nothing without the gift, but the gift is nothing without work. - Emile Zola

The excellence of a gift lies in its appropriateness rather than in its value. - Charles Dudley Warner

The gift of fantasy has meant more to me than my talent for absorbing positive knowledge. - Albert Einstein

The greatest gift is not found in a store nor under a tree, but in the hearts of true friends. - Cindy Lew

The greatest gift that you can give to others is the gift of unconditional love and acceptance. - Brian Tracy

The greatest gift that you can give yourself is a little bit of your own attention. - Anthony D'Angelo

The greatest gift you can give someone is your time, your attention, your love, your concern. - Joel Osteen

The greatest gifts you can give your children are the roots of responsibility and the wings of independence. - Denis Waitley

The most precious gift we can offer anyone is our attention. When mindfulness embraces those we love, they will bloom like flowers. - Thich Nhat Hanh

The most precious gifts you can give your loved ones are loving words and deeds, of compassion, forgiveness, appreciation, understanding, and acceptance. - Unknown

The weakest among us has a gift, however seemingly trivial, which is peculiar to him and which worthily used will be a gift also to his race. - John Ruskin

Unconditional love is the greatest gift we can ever give. - Amy Leigh Mercree

We are each gifted in a unique and important way. It is our privilege and our adventure to discover our special light. - Mary Dunbar

With the gift of listening comes the gift of healing. - Catherine De Hueck

You have three gifts you control: your thoughts, your speech and your behaviour. With these three, you can change your whole life and the whole world. - Unknown

Fate - Quotes

A man's character is his fate. - Heraclitus

All that is called Destiny or Fate is none other than the result of our thoughtlessness and our mistrust of ourselves; we should know that all that is created on earth is created by its sole Master and Laborer – Man. - Maxim Gorky

All we can control in life is our own choices, how we choose to live and deal with what life has to offer. Everything else is fate. - Mark Puryear

Blame it on a simple twist of fate. - Bob Dylan

Even human being is the artificer of his own fate … Events, circumstances, etc., have their origin in ourselves. They spring from seeds which we have sown. - H. D Thoreau

Everyone is more or less master of his own fate. - Aesop

Fate ... is a name for facts not yet passed under the fire of thought – for causes which are unpenetrated. - Ralph Waldo Emerson

Fate comes by our own agency. It belongs to our underlying spiritual values, because it is unattainable without experience of the world, and therefore differs from one person to the next. - Stelios Ramphos

Fate had a weird way of circling back over paths that were meant to cross. - Gail McHugh

Fate has a way of charting its own course … but before one surrenders to the hands of destiny, one might consider the power of the human spirit and the force that lies in one’s own free will. - Unknown

Faith includes noticing the mess, the emptiness and discomfort, and letting it be there until some light returns. - Anne Lamott

Fate is a manifestation of natural causes. That’s it. It’s not a conscious entity. It has no plan. - Walter Wykes

Fate is a misplaced retreat. Many people rationalize an unexplained event as fate and shrug their shoulders when it occurs. But that is not what fate is. The world operates as a series of circles that are invisible, for they extend to the upper air. Fate is where these circles cut to earth. Since we cannot see them, do not know their content, and have no sense of their width, it is impossible to predict when these cuts will slice into our reality. When this happens, we call it fate. Fate is not a chance event but one that is inevitable, we are simply blind to its nature and time. - James Levine

Fate is a primitive notion that makes no sense in a land of self-made men and women. - J. Peter Euben 

Fate is written in wood, not stone. - Geraint Straker

Fate isn't black or white, right or left. People aren't just plopped down and made to follow one route in life on the whims of the gods. If that were true, we'd have to say Hitler was only a victim of his own destiny, and therefore blameless ... We have decisions to make, actions to take, good ones and bad ones that make up the texture of our lives. Everything we do or don't do matters ... Everything counts at the end of the day ... we have a pattern to make. We have to see it through, try to find a way to complete it. - Nora Roberts

Fate isn't one straight road ... There are forks in it, many different routes to different ends. We have the free will to choose the path. - Dean Koontz

Fate isn't sentient; it can't make decisions. - Rick Chiantaretto

Fate is for those too weak to determine their own destiny. - Kamran Hamid

Fate is the endless chain of causation, whereby things are; the reason or formula by which the world goes on. - Citium Zeno

Fate leads the willing, drags the unwilling. - Cleanthes

Fate only takes you so far. The rest is up to you. - Unknown

Fate or divine dispensation is merely a convention which has come to be regarded as truth by being repeatedly declared to be true. If this god or fate is truly the ordainer of everything in this world, of what meaning is any action (even like bathing, speaking or giving), and whom should one teach at all? No. In this world, except a corpse, everything is active and such activity yields its appropriate result. - Vankaesananda

Fate will find a way. - Virgil

For all the cruelty and hardship of our world, we are not mere prisoners of fate. Our actions matter, and can bend history in the direction of justice. - Barack Obama

Great powers may be shaping the general turn of events, but human personalities still determine their own fate. - Dan Simmons 

Heaven from all creatures hides the book of Fate, All but the page prescrib'd, their present state. - Alexander Pope

How a person masters his fate is more important than what his fate is. - Wilhelm Von Humboldt

I do not believe in a fate that will fall on us no matter what we do. I do believe in a fate that will fall on us if we do nothing. - Ronald Reagan

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

If anyone does not help himself, fate never can help him. -  HuanZhang Chen

If you can’t change your fate, change your attitude. - Charles Revson 

Men make their own history; but they make it under given conditions, and they become entangled thereby in a fate which is in part the result of other men having made their own history earlier. - Reinhard Bendix

Notions of chance and fate are the preoccupations of men engaged in rash undertakings. - Cormac McCarthy

Our fate is something which exists outside ourselves, and which once revealed expresses the meaning of our lives. Apart, however, from soothsayers who claim to have a means of foretelling exactly what will befall us, this kind of fate is only normally revealed after a life has ended. Only then can the meaning of that life be understood. - Andrew Gamble

Sometimes fate is like a small sandstorm that keeps changing directions. You change direction but the sandstorm chases you. You turn again, but the storm adjusts. Over and over you play this out, like some ominous dance with death just before dawn. Why? Because this storm isn't something that blew in from far away, something that has nothing to do with you. This storm is you. Something inside of you. So, all you can do is give in to it, step right inside the storm, closing your eyes and plugging up your ears so the sand doesn't get in, and walk through it, step by step. There's no sun there, no moon, no direction, no sense of time. Just fine white sand swirling up into the sky like pulverized bones. - Haruki Murakami

Sometimes our fate resembles a fruit tree in winter. Who would think that those branches would turn green again and blossom, but we hope it, we know it. - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Sometimes when one walks away from his fate, it leads one directly to fate’s doorstep. Unknown 

The Book of Fate isn't already written. It's written every day. - Brad Meltzer

The catch-22 is either everything is based on fate or nothing is. - Rhonda Britten

The furnace which melts gold, also hardens clay. Before blaming thy fate, therefore, find whether thou art gold or clay. - Ivan Panin

The future’s not set. There is no fate but what we make for ourselves. - John Connor

The harder thy fate, the softer thine heart. - Ivan Panin

The idea of fate has always had a special appeal in religious, mystical, and philosophical thinking. There are several compelling reasons for this fascination, the most obvious of which is that human life is short and human efforts are frequently futile. As a species endowed with the capacity for thought, people want to find some kind of explanation, purpose, or meaning for their lives. The idea that a superior force – fate – shapes the course of their lives and determines what becomes of them helps people to interpret their experiences and adjust themselves to their circumstances. Arising out of a state of anxiety and bewilderment, it thus fulfils a basic human need for order and harmony. - Dalya Cohen-mor

The wise man always reflects upon the extreme vicissitudes of fate. In times of the greatest triumph he bears in mind the transitoriness of life; in times of the greatest calamity he reflects upon the unpredictability of fortune, perhaps even the possibility of a renewal. Knowledge is virtue where it helps men attain inner peace in the midst of the fate that is their lot. - Reinhard Bendix

The word "fate" is used by people who have lost sight of who they are. - Clark Kent

The youth should be taught that he alone is great, who, by a life heroic, conquers fate; that diligence is the mother of good luck; that, nine times out of ten, what we call luck or fate is but a mere bugbear of the indolent, the languid, the purposeless, the careless, the indifferent; that the man who fails, as a rule, does not see or seize his opportunity. - Orison Swett Marden

There’s much to be said for challenging fate instead of ducking behind it. - Diana Trilling

Those who have been indulged by fortune and have always thought of calamity as what happens to others, feel a blind incredulous rage at the reversal of their lot, and half believe that their wild cries will alter the course of the storm. - George Eliot

To bear is to conquer our fate. - Thomas Campbell

We are spinning our own fates, good or evil, never to be undone. - William James

We seal our fate with the choices we make. - Gloria Estefan

Whatever be thy fate today, remember, this will pass away! - John Godfrey Saxe

When fate comes in to play, choice sometimes goes out the window. - Unknown 

When fate shuts a door, come in through the window. - Unknown

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

Yet they, believe me, who await no gifts from Chance, have conquer'd Fate. - Matthew Arnold

You can’t outwit fate by standing on the side-lines placing little side-bets about the outcome of life. Either you wade in and risk everything you have to play the game or you don’t play at all. And if you don’t play you can’t win. - Judith McNaught

You cannot leave everything to Fate, she’s got a lot to do. Sometimes you must give her a hand. - Leonardo da Vinci