Fate vs. Free Will Quotes

To exist without purpose is to be at the mercy of the chance encounter, the chance invitation, the chance phone call, the chance event- always being controlled by forces external to oneself.

Your destiny is shaped by choice, never by chance. Beware the decisions you make, no matter how small, for they will be your salvation...or your death.

The future is not set. There is no fate but what we make.

If nothing is random, and everything is predetermined, how can there be free will? The answer to that is simple. Nothing is predetermined; it is determined, or was determined, or will be determined.

Ignorance is bliss. Oedipus ruined a great sex life by asking too many questions.

...there was no such thing as curses. People make and break their own fortunes -they are the masters of their own fate.

...where's the skill in being a hero if you were always destined to do it?

He said that whether a man's life was writ in a book someplace or whether it took its form day by day was one and the same for it had but one reality and that was the living of it.

I see Macbeth as a young, open-faced warrior, who is gradually sucked into a whirpool of events because of his ambition. When he meets the weird sisters and hears their prophecy, he's like the man who hopes to win a million - a gamble for high stakes.

Shakespeare is all big themes, like the most amazing love, or the most scary war.

Evil is done without effort, naturally, it is the working of fate; good is always the product of an art.

He either fears his fate too much, Or his deserts are small, That dares not put it to the touch, To gain or lose it all.

Sometimes you wonder, I mean really wonder. I know we make our own reality, and we always have a choice, but how much is preordained? Is there always a fork in the road, and are there two preordained paths that are equally preordained? There could be hundreds of paths where one could go this way or that way -- there's a chance, and it's very strange sometimes.

I knew it like destiny, and at the same time, I knew it as choice.

I guess destiny isn't the path chosen for us, but the path we chose for ourselves.

True tragedy may be defined as a dramatic work in which the outward failure of the principal personage is compensated for by the dignity and greatness of his character.

We are all such accidents. We do not make up history and culture. We simply appear, not by our own choice. We make what we can of our condition with the means available. We must accept the mixture as we find it - the impurity of it, the tragedy of it, the hope of it.

In the end, each life is no more than the sum of contingent facts, a chronicle of chance intersections, of flukes, of random events that divulge nothing but their own lack of purpose.

In 'The Adjustment Bureau,' Damon shows movie-star concentration as David Norris, a politician whose world ambitions hit a pothole when his angry streak becomes public.

Life's only choosing when to die. Life's a big postponement because the choice is so difficult. It's a tremendous relief not to have to choose.

The core of literature is the idea of tragedy... You don't really learn much from the good things that happen to you.

I got Oedipus off the incest charge--technicality, of course--he didn't know it was his mother at the time.

Responsibility: A detachable burden easily shifted to the shoulders of God, Fate, Fortune, Luck or one's neighbor. In the days of astrology it was customary to unload it upon a star.

Tragedy and comedy are simply questions of value; a little misfit in life makes us laugh; a great one is tragedy and cause for expression of grief.

In Shakespeare's world, characters cannot trust their senses. Is the ghost in Hamlet true and truthful, or is it a demon, tempting young Hamlet into murderous sin? Is Juliet dead or merely sleeping? Does Lear really stand at the edge of a great cliff? Or has the Fool deceived him to save his life?