There are winds of destiny that blow when we least expect them. Sometimes they gust with the fury of a hurricane, sometimes they barely fan one’s cheek. But the winds cannot be denied, bringing as they often do a future that is impossible to ignore.
Only the fool, fixed in his folly, may think he can turn the wheel on which he turns.
You are the master of your own earthly destiny just as surely as you have the power to control your own thoughts. You may influence, direct, and eventually control your own environment, making your life what you want it to be.
With the strength of our love and of our will, we can change our destiny, as well as the destiny of many others.
Was a struggle to choose one’s own destiny less worthwhile than the necessity to stop a great evil?
The ancients, even though they believed in destiny, believed primarily in nature, in which they participated wholeheartedly.[C’est que les Anciens, s’ils croyaient au destin, croyaient d’abord à la nature, à laquelle ils participaient.]
Our destiny rules over us, even when we are not yet aware of it; it is the future that makes laws for our today.[Unsere Bestimmung verfügt über uns, auch wenn wir sie noch nicht kennen; es ist die Zukunft, die unserm Heute die Regel giebt.]
It is true that the path of human destiny cannot but appal him who surveys a section of it. But he will do well to keep his small personal commentarie to himself, as one does at the sight of the sea or of majestic mountains, unless he knows himself to be called and gifted to give them expression in artistic or prophetic form. In most other cases the voluminous talk about intuition does nothing but conceal a lack of perspective toward the object, which merits the same judgment as a similar lack of perspective toward men.
If you keep your destiny in mind, every moment in life becomes an opportunity for moving closer to it.
If what matters in a person’s existence is to accept the inevitable consciously, to taste the good and bad to the full and to make for oneself a more individual, unaccidental and inward destiny alongside one’s external fate, then my life has been neither empty nor worthless.
I have come to realize that destiny can hurt a person as much as it can bless him, and I find myself wondering why—out of all the people in all the world I could ever have loved—I had to fall in love with someone who was taken away from me.
He who is destined for the gallows will not drown.
