Alexis de Tocqueville Quotes

Let America add Mexico to Texas, and pile Cuba upon Canada; let the English overswarm all India, and hang out their blazing banner from the sun; two thirds of this terraqueous globe are the Nantucketer's. For the sea is his; he owns it.

He who commands the sea has command of everything.

With our eyes fixed on the future, but recognizing the realities of today, we will achieve our destiny to be as a shining city on a hill for all mankind to see.

Whoever commands the sea, commands the trade; whosoever commands the trade of the world commands the riches of the world, and consequently the world itself.

I believe the world benefits from American leadership. I believe this next century should be an American century.

I try to make sense of things. Which is why, I guess, I believe in destiny. There must be a reason that I am as I am. There must be.

Just my luck, if I believed in luck. I only believe in the opposite of luck, whatever that is.

Some like to believe it's the book that chooses the person.

I believe in destiny. I believe destiny opens doors for you, but it's up to you to walk through them.

We could almost believe that we are destined by Providence to an unsettled position on the globe, so invariably is a love of change implanted in the young. It seems as if the eternal Lawgiver intended that, at a certain age, man should leave father, mother, and the dwelling of his infancy, to seek his fortunes over the wide world.

Those who believe in this type of thing [Paul the Octopus, who ‘predicted’ the result of World Cup matches] cannot be the leaders of the global nations that aspire, like Iran, to human perfection, basing themselves in the love of all sacred values.

Each state of the human mind has some parable in the physical creation by which it is shadowed forth; nor is it only artists and poets, but even the most abstract thinkers that have drawn from this source. Lively activity we name fire; time is a stream that rolls on, sweeping all before it; eternity is a circle; a mystery is hid in midnight gloom, and truth dwells in the sun. Nay, I begin to believe that even the future destiny of the human race is prefigured in the dark oracular utterances of bodily creation.

I hope that my new status will be an example of Israeli-Palestinian co-existence, I believe that the destinies of the Israeli people and the Palestinian people are inextricably linked.

I detest violence. I have a tremendous respect not only for human life but also for the animal life that I have to live with, and I believe that our destiny as human beings is to become nature-conscious as well as self-conscious, living in loving relationship and in balance and in harmony, not only with one another, but with the entire natural world.

Men believe death's elections to be a thing inscrutable yet every act invites the act which follows and to the extent that men put one foot before the other they are accomplices in their own deaths as in all such facts of destiny.

I am not a strict constructionalist, believing that we seal our eternal progress by what we do here. It is my belief that God will save all of His children that he can: and while, if we live unrighteously here, we shall not go to the other side in the same status, so to speak, as those who lived righteously; nevertheless, the unrighteous will have their chance, and in the eons of the eternities that are to follow, they, too, may climb to the destinies to which they who are righteous and serve God, have climbed to those eternities that are to come.

There are people and places and events you'd prefer to forget or at least gloss over. In the end, you can slap a pretty label on it - like serendipity or fate. Or you can believe that it's just the random way life unfolds.

There is no insurmountable solitude. All paths lead to the same goal: to convey to others what we are. And we must pass through solitude and difficulty, isolation and silence in order to reach forth to the enchanted place where we can dance our clumsy dance and sing our sorrowful song - but in this dance or in this song there are fulfilled the most ancient rites of our conscience in the awareness of being human and of believing in a common destiny.

We didn't believe in fate, but we believed in serendipity. We felt very lucky.

What I believe when it comes to big things in life, there are no accidents. Everything happens for a reason. You are here for a reason - and it's not to fail and die.

The more confidence you have in yourself and the more you believe that you are destined to do what you are gonna do, it will happen.

I believe in destiny. But I also believe that you can’t just sit back and let destiny happen. A lot of times, an opportunity might fall into your lap, but you have to be ready for that opportunity. You can’t sit there waiting on it. A lot of times you are going to have to get out there and make it happen.

On one occasion I got this really bizarre horoscope thing from someone. It was a full-on zodiac reading, charting and intersecting all this stuff. It was over 20 pages long and said we're destined to be together. That was totally bizarre. I don't really believe in that stuff anyway, although I do believe in Karma because it's already bitten me on the ass so many times.

I don't know yet whether I fully believe in fate, but certain things do happen in a man's life that he cannot explain.

You can believe in Fung Shui if you want, but ultimately people control their own fate. The most important thing is to improve yourself and give it your best. Then many things previously thought to be impossible will become possible.