Marguerite Yourcenar Quotes

I believe that fate is choices - it's not chance.

Each man lived his own life and paid his own price for living it. The only pity was one had to pay so often for a single fault. One had to pay over and over again, indeed. In her dealings with man, Destiny never closed her accounts.

What people commonly call fate is mostly their own stupidity.

What people commonly call Fate is, as a general rule, nothing but their own stupid and foolish conduct.

At fifty everyone has the face he deserves.

Our acts make or mar us, we are the children of our own deeds.

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

A fate is not a punishment.

How rash to assert that man shapes his own destiny. All he can do is determine his inner responses.

Is Fate getting what you deserve, or deserving what you get?

Destiny is the result of all your actions and the impressions that you have taken in.

I do not believe that things happen accidentally; I believe you earn them.

You do what you do and you pay for your sins and there's no such thing as what might have been.

Your current conditions are echoes of your past choices.

Only the wise know just where predestination ends and free will begins. Meanwhile, you must keep on doing your best, according to your own clearest understanding. you must long for freedom as the drowning man longs for air. Without sincere longing, you will never find God.

Every individual acts and suffers in accordance with his peculiar teleology, which has all the inevitability of fate, so long as he does not understand it.

It's the niceties that make the difference fate gives us the hand, and we play the cards.

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

Our lives are a sum total of the choices we have made.

Man is supposed to be the maker of his destiny. It is only partly true. He can make his destiny, only in so far as he is allowed by the Great Power.

Everybody is dealt a hand of cards. It was my choice to play them the way I played them.

Character is destiny, and politicians usually get the scandals they deserve, with a sense of inevitability about them.

We are people in circumstances who make choices that we think are right at the time.

I feel like I'm worried about my later years in life because I feel like I'm using up so much good karma right now. There's going to be some sort of karmic backlash somewhere down the road.

Circumstances define us; they force us onto one road or another, and then they punish us for it.