Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes

Things happen in the way they usually should. I'm a pretty fatalistic person.

No one knew where you were before you were born, but when you were born, it wasn't long before you found you'd arrived with your return ticket already punched.

Men speak of blind destiny, a thing without scheme or purpose. But what sort of destiny is that? Each act in this world from which there can be no turning back has before it another, and it another yet. In a vast endless net. Men imagine that the choices before them are theirs to make. But we are free to act only upon what is given. Choice is lost in the maze of generations and each act in the maze is itself an enslavement for it voids every alternative and binds one ever more tightly into the constraints that make a life.

In accordance with the prarabdha of each, the One whose function it is to ordain makes each to act. What will not happen will never happen, whatever effort one may put forth. And what will happen will not fail to happen, however much one may seek to prevent it. This is certain. The part of wisdom therefore is to stay quiet.

I often feel, and ever more deeply I realize, that fate and character are the same conception.

I believe in fate. Sometimes that means an old bearded guy sitting on a cloud and pulling the strings; sometimes it means random atoms swirling through a cheerless universe; sometimes it means everything being preordained thanks to your karma credit from your previous lives.

I have always believed that there is no such thing as coincidence, and I have always believed in destiny.

You can't fight your fate...It is predestined.

This whole act's immutably decreed. 'Twas rehearsed by thee and me a billion years before this ocean rolled. Fool! I am the Fates' lieutenant; I act under orders.

It lies not in our power to love or hate, for will in us is overruled by fate.

I believe in science but I also believe in fate.

Everything is determined, the beginning as well as the end, by forces over which we have no control. It is determined for the insect, as well as for the star. Human beings, vegetables, or cosmic dust, we all dance to a mysterious tune, intoned in the distance by an invisible piper.

All things are in fate, yet all things are not decreed by fate.

Fate is a quantity very much like TV: an unstoppable narrative, written, produced and directed by somebody else.

Perhaps Fate laid out your life for you like a dress on a bed, and you could either wear it or go naked.

Some things can't be changed. They'll always happen the way they were supposed to.

Luck cannot change birth.

Whatever may happen to thee, it was prepared for thee from all eternity.

Chance does nothing that has not been prepared beforehand.

Fortune raises up and fortune brings low both the man who fares well and the one who fares badly; and there is no prophet of the future for mortal men.

There is no such thing as chance; and what seem to us merest accident springs from the deepest source of destiny.

You're not always able to choose.

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