Wislawa Szymborska Quotes

The end is in the beginning and lies far ahead.

What happened yesterday affects today; what happens today will affect tomorrow/

There's no way to know what makes one thing happen and not another. What leads to what. What destroys what. What causes what to flourish or die or take another course. But I was pretty certain as I sat there that tonight that if it hadn't been for Eddie, I wouldn't have found myself on the PCT. And though it was true that everything I felt for him sat like a boulder in my throat, this realization made the boulder sit ever so much lighter. He hadn't loved me well in the end, but he'd loved me well when it mattered.

There is no luck in life, everything happens for a reason. Every little thing that you do... leads up to a bigger thing. And that's the story of my life.

There is no accident, just as there is no beginning and no end.

In the beginning was the thing. And one thing led to another.

The beginning is the promise of the end.

Events are as much the parents of the future as they were the children of the past.

To our critical eyes, the threads of which the past is woven are, by nature, endless and indivisible. Scientifically speaking, we cannot grasp the absolute beginning of anything: everything extends backwards to be prolonged by something else.

You cannot go through life without cause and effect.

There's no such thing as accidents.

Fate and history have a similar feeling. They are weird mirrors to each other.

Things don't happen for no reason.

For one change always leaves a dovetail into which another will fit.

Pause you who read this, and think for a moment of the long chain of iron or gold, of thorns or flowers, that would never have bound you, but for the formation of the first link on one memorable day.

Whatever doesn't really happen is dreamed at night. It happens to one if it doesn't happen to another, tomorrow if not today, or a century hence if not next year.

There is not any present moment that is unconnected with some future one. The life of every man is a continued chain of incidents, each link of which hangs upon the former.

It seems to me further, that it is very odd that fate should leave so careful a trail, and spend so little time preparing the one that must follow it.

The unpredictable and the predetermined unfold together to make everything the way it is.

Everything that happens, happens of necessity.

Our last deed, like the young of the land crab, wends its way to the sea of cause and effect as soon as born, and makes a drop there to eternity.

The true secret in being a hero lies in knowing the order of things...Things must happen when it is time for them to happen.

The first word gives origin to the second, the first and second to the third, and the third to the fourth, and so on. You cannot begin with the second word.

Events do not really have beginnings or ends. Behind every event is the previous one, causing, or helping to cause, what follows.

Men's courses will foreshadow certain ends, to which, if persevered in, they must lead," said Scrooge. "But if the courses be departed from, the ends will change.