Tao Te Ching
Fate / Destiny
Most understand the ideas of fate and destiny purely from a superstitious point of view. It’s not difficult however to weave in scientific notions of genetics, biology, and evolution; psychological theories of personality development, effects of trauma and other other major life events; sociological influences of culture, peer pressure, advertising, and marketing. The influences on our lives and decisions are powerful but—at the same time—subtle and disguised. How much depends on Free Will? How much is conditioned and outside our influence? How distorted and mistaken our conclusions? Some postulate a sameness, a deep and common humanity; our differences only created by different environments. Some say our only choice is to accept or fight against our momentary experience. These speculations can lead to a fatalistic determinism; but, they can also form a foundation for Wu Wei, a journey without goal, a wisdom-filled awareness guiding consciousness.
Quotes (82)
“It is better to live your own destiny imperfectly than to live an imitation of somebody else's life with perfection.”
“When it is a man’s fate to undertake new beginnings, everything is still unformed, dark. Therefore he must hold back because any premature move might bring disaster.”
“And fate? No one alive has ever escaped it, neither brave man nor coward, I tell you—it's born with us the day that we are born.”
“To accept destiny is to face life with open eyes; not to accept destiny is to face death blindfolded.”
“What you are is what you have been. What you'll be is what you do now.”
“Dreadful is the mysterious power of Fate; there is no escape from it by wealth or war, by walled city, or dark, sea-beaten ships.”
“Confucians believe firmly in the existence of fate and propound this doctrine... if officials believe such ideas, they will be lax in their duties; and if the common people believe them, they will neglect their tasks.”
“Do not let the artificial obliterate the natural; do not let will obliterate destiny; do not let virtue be sacrificed to fame”
“Age creeps on apace, all will soon be over;
If only it could be forever as this time it was!
But man's fate is fixed;
From meetings and partings none can ever escape.”
“The race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to mend of understanding, nor yet favor to men of skill; but time and chance happens to them all.”
“Death is the destiny of everyone; the living should take this to heart.”
“The harp playing of Xanthippe and her talk, her expressive eyes and her song — and the fire within her just now beginning; these, my soul, will inflame you. The reasons why or whence or how I do not know; but you will know, ill-fated soul, that you are burning.”
“Who then is free? The wise man who commands his passions, who fears not death, nor chain, firmly resisting his appetites and despising the honors of the world, who relies wholly on himself, whose angular points of character have all been rounded off and polished and against whom Fortune in her onset is ever defeated.”
“The chief task in life is simply this: to identify and separate matters so that I can say clearly to myself which are externals not under my control, and which have to do with the choices I actually control. Where then do I look for good and evil? Not to uncontrollable externals, but within myself to the choices that are my own…”
“An owl, noiseless as a feathered cloud, glided away in the moonlight, a songbird in its left foot. Fate goes ever as it must.”
“Listen: this story's one you ought to know,
You'll reap the consequence of what you sow.”
“How shall a man escape from that which is written; How shall he flee from his destiny?”
“’Tis all a checker board of nights and days
Where Destiny with Men for Pieces plays:
Hither and thither moves, and mates, and slays,
And one by one back in the Closet lays.”
“Khayyám, who stitched the tens of science,
His fallen in grief's furnace and been suddenly burned;
The shears of Fate have cut the tent ropes of his life,
And the broker of Hope has sold him for nothing!”
“As I look back on my life, I realize that every time I thought I was being rejected from something good; I was actually being redirected to something better.”
“Evil has its evil reward. Even the clever cannot escape… its retribution is ingenious and beyond the reach of human plans. It never lets evildoers slip through its net.”
“It may quite well be that without cause you are thus in despair.
How can you tell beforehand how you'll fare?
And why must you the worst always suppose,
Although the outcome you nor no one knows?
”
“One life is all we have and we live it as we believe in living it. But to sacrifice what you are and to live without belief, that is a fate more terrible than dying.”
“Think more highly of what fate has given you rather than what it has denied.”
“Think more highly of what fate has given you rather than what it has denied.”
“The way of the Creative works through change and transformation, so that each thing receives its true nature and destiny and comes into permanent accord with the Great Harmony: this is what furthers and what perseveres.”
“The more he saw, the more he doubted… courage was often rashness; and prudence, cowardice; generosity, a clever piece of calculation; justice, a wrong; honesty, a modus vivendi; and by some strange dispensation of fate, he must see that those who at heart were really honest, scrupulous, just, generous, prudent or brave were held cheaply by their fellow-men.”
“The very essence of instinct is that it’s followed independently of reason.”
“a laugh's the wisest, easiest answer to all that's queer; and come what will, one comfort's always left—that unfailing comfort is, it's all predestinated... I know not all that may be coming, but be it what it will, I'll go to it laughing.”
“I thank fate for having made me born poor. Poverty taught me the true value of the gifts useful to life.”
“Why so soft, so pliant and yielding? Why is there so much denial, self denial, in your hearts? So little destiny in your eyes?… For all creators are hard. And it must seem blessedness to you to impress your hand on millennia as on wax.”
“It is perhaps a more fortunate destiny to have a taste for collecting shells than to be born a millionaire.”
“The derivation of a need for religion from the child's feeling of helplessness and the longing it evokes for a father seems to me incontrovertible... [and] kept alive perpetually by the fear of what the superior power of fate will bring.”
“It is possible that in contact with western science, and inspired by the spirit of history, the original teachings of Gautama , revived and purified, may yet play a large part in the direction of human destiny”
“But perhaps there are in us forces other than mind and heart, other even than the senses—mysterious forces which take hold of us in the moments when the others are asleep.”
“Men are helpless as far as their fate is concerned, but they can ally themselves with the good, and in suffering and dying, die and suffer nobly. This is the spirit of Sophocles He had the sure instinct of the consummate artist, he had a supreme gift of poetic expression, a great intellect, and an unsurpassed sureness of beautiful workmanship”
“We find a little of everything in our memory; it is a kind of pharmacy or chemical laboratory in which chance guides our hand now to a calming drug and now to a dangerous poison.”
“Fate itself if subdued by the mind which leaves nothing to be purged by the purifying fire of Time.”
“Whoever speaks in primordial images speaks with a thousand voices; he transmutes our personal destiny into the destiny of mankind, and evokes in us all those beneficent forces that ever and anon have enabled humanity to find refuge from every peril and to outlive the longest night.”
“No nation keeps its word. A nation is a big, blind worm, following what? Fate perhaps. A nation has no honor, it has no word to keep. …”
“In resigning ourselves to our fate without a struggle, we are guilty of inhumanity.”
“She was a murderess, but on top of that she had also murdered herself. For one who commits such a crime destroys her own soul... Sometimes it seems as if even animals and plants 'know' it.”
“A man lives not only his personal life, as an individual, but also, consciously or unconsciously, the life of his epoch and his contemporaries.”
“the long silence from which everything begins and in which everything ends. Intimately known and yet strange like Nature, lovingly tender and yet cruel like fate,.. the totality of life of which we are a small and helpless part.”
“Let yourself be carried away, like the clouds in the sky. You shouldn’t resist. God exists in your destiny just as much as he does in these mountains and in that lake.”
“Man does not realize that throughout his entire life he does things he believes. Precisely what to believe and how to believe comprises the solution of the problems of being. Man's free will or free choice molds his destiny.”
“These dark days will be worth all they cost us if they teach us that our true destiny is not to be ministered unto but to minister to ourselves and to our fellow men.”
“And all the lives we ever lived and all the lives to be are full of trees and changing leaves.”
“My soul suddenly longed to transcend its destiny, breathe free air, and become a bird—for a flash only, as long as it could endure. But that was enough; this flash was eternity. That is the meaning of eternity.”
“As every poet must be, Euripides is above all sensitive; he feels the problems of mankind intensely and express them with passion; he is the most tragic and the most human of dramatists. He created living individuals replacing operations of destiny with psychological analysis.”
“In the end nothing is lost; for good or evil, every event has effects forever.”
“Greek religion paved the way for philosophy by emphasizing Fate which became the idea of law, a force more powerful than personal fiat creating the fundamental difference between mythology and science.”
“Struggle is the most invaluable experience of all. Suffering seems to be the inevitable fate of the creative sensitive types. Poverty, disease, death, unrequited love affairs, and disappointments of every sort fan the flame of the artistic spirit. The greatest works of art were not created by spoiled brats. They were born for the most part out of a sense of despair, and if not despair then just plain hard work. Somewhere along the line the artist learns the art of transformation.”
“Everybody strains after happiness, and the result is that nobody's happy.”
“appalled by the raw vigor that chafed under the old euphemisms, and by the too obtrusive fate that heeded its inhabitants along a short cut from nothing to nothing, she saw something awful in the very simplicity she failed to understand.”
“The I Ching is actually concerned with nothing other than the recognition of causes and conditions which determine our destiny. He who knows the causes, or sees the germinations, controls what is otherwise felt as fate.”
“If you have character, endeavor, personality, courage and the capacity for concentrated labor, you will do what is your destiny – and, perhaps, even do it well.”
“If we are always arriving and departing, it is also true that we are eternally anchored. One's destination is never a place but rather a new way of looking at things.”
“He directs the destiny of the nations, but he cannot direct his own destiny with dignity or wisdom for ten consecutive minutes.”
“Ah destiny… touched by that dark miracle of chance which makes new magic in a dusty world.”
“Human destiny is bound to remain a gamble, because at some unpredictable time and in some unforeseeable manner nature will strike back. The multiplicity of determinants which affect biological systems limits the power of the experimental method to predict their trends and behavior.”
“Love thine enemies because they are the instruments of your destiny.”
“A Warrior is the master of his fate. No matter what fate throws at him, fame or infamy, health or sickness, poverty or riches, he uses the situation for his own inner development.”
“If Christianity is pessimistic as to man, it is optimistic as to human destiny. Marxism, pessimistic as to destiny, pessimistic as to human nature, is optimistic as to the progress of history.”
“While preachers preach of evil fates
Teachers teach that knowledge waits
Can lead to hundred-dollar plates
Goodness hides behind its gates
But even the President of the United States sometimes must have
To stand naked.”
“People devote a lot of energy to thinking about things. Whether they want to or not. Yet in the end we all just have to wait—only time can tell how events play out. The answers lie ahead.”
“It was a Chinese kind of Buddhism, which is a bit of this, that, and the other—ancestor worship, a belief in ghosts, bad fate, all the frightful things. But it was not the Burmese version that desires nothing. With our kind of Buddhism, we desired everything…”
“I think where people tend to end up results from a combination of encouragement, accident, and lucky break… So it's all about trying to find the best fit between your talents and what the world can offer at that point in time.”
“I think where people tend to end up results from a combination of encouragement, accident, and lucky break… So it's all about trying to find the best fit between your talents and what the world can offer at that point in time.”
“The veil deliberately marks women as private and restricted property, nonpersons. The veil sets women apart from men and apart from the world; it restrains them, confines them, grooms them for docility. A mind can be cramped just as a body may be, and a Muslim veil blinkers both your vision and your destiny. It is the mark of a kind of apartheid, not the domination of a race but of a sex.”
“The Greeks did not waste any sacrifices on Fate, and Hindus built no temples to Atman... The fundamental insight of polytheism is that the supreme power governing the world is unconcerned with the mundane desires, cares, and worries of humans.”
“Industrial farming is one of the worst crimes in history... the fate of industrially farmed animals [is] one of the most pressing ethical questions of our time.”
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