Life's Course Quotes

Maybe Fate isn't the pond you swim in but the fisherman floating on top of it, letting you run the line wild until you are weary enough to be reeled back in.

All of us have a path to follow and the path begins on earth.

Life was what happened when all the what-if’s didn’t, when what you dreamed or hoped or – in this case – feared might come to pass passed by instead.

Life takes its own turns, makes its own demands, writes its own story, and along the way, we start to realize we are not the author.

Small events and choices determine the direction of our lives just as small helms determine the directions of great ships.

You know, it's a long world.

Life’s a voyage that’s homeward bound.

You never know where the future will take you.

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

And see the rivers how they run Through woods and meads, in shade and sun, Sometimes swift, sometimes slow, Wave succeeding wave, they go A various journey to the deep, Like human life to endless sleep!

We should not speak of one that prospers well As happy, till his life have run its course, And reached its goal. An evil spirit's gift In shortest time has oft laid low the state Of one full rich in great prosperity, When the change comes, and so the Gods appoint.

The popular culture says . . . Do what you do, your life is predestined, like the installment plan on your house. There's not much you can do about it. Make your payments, live it, get sick, die, don't make any trouble. It is the Master Charge of destiny. Try to get your high credit rating.

Men try to run life according to their wishes; life runs itself according to necessity.

Perhaps we all lose our sense of reality to the precise degree to which we are engrossed in our own work, and perhaps that is why we see in the increasing complexity of our mental constructs a means for greater understanding, even while intuitively we know that we shall never be able to fathom the imponderables that govern our course through life.

Your life's course will not be determined by doing the things that you are certain you can do. Those are the easy things. It will be determined by whether you try the things that are hard.

I'm on this road for the rest of my life.

At some unnoticed moment, I began to understand that a life is written in indelible ink.

The mortal experience . . . is not like a college course which we can passively audit. Instead, we are taking life's course for credit and there are no summers off - not even semester breaks.

No wonder that, when a political career is so precarious, men of worth and capacity hesitate to embrace it. They cannot afford to be thrown out of their life's course by a mere accident.

No cause has he to say his doom is harsh, who's made the master of his destiny.

Must helpless man, in ignorance sedate, roll darkly down the torrent of his fate.

Life has many turns.

Fortune does us neither good nor hurt; she only presents us the matter, and the seed, which our soul, more powerfully than she, turns and applies as she best pleases; being the sole cause and sovereign mistress of her own happy or unhappy condition.

She was a natural blonde, with delicate hands and feet, and in her youthful photographs one saw a girl with mocking eyes and a tragic smile, the course of whose life would conspire in time to transpose that pair of adjectives.