Fate

Works to read

• Zadig; or, The Book of Fate by Voltaire, 1747 (enlarged 1748)
• The Discourses by Epictetus, c. 108 · Great Books
• Paradise Lost by John Milton, 1667; revised 1674 · Great Books
• Mourning Becomes Electra by Eugene O'Neill, 1931 · Great Books
• The Story of the Volsungs (Volsunga Saga) by Anonymous (Old Norse), 13th century
• De Monarchia (with R. W. Church's essay on Dante) by Dante Alighieri; R. W. Church, c. 1312-1318
• Julius Caesar by William Shakespeare, 1599
• Hamlet by William Shakespeare, c. 1600
• Give Me Liberty or Give Me Death by Patrick Henry, delivered 1775; text published 1817
• To a Mouse by Robert Burns, 1785 (published 1786)
• The Thousand and One Nights (Lane's translation, Volume I) by Anonymous; translated by Edward William Lane, 1838-1841
• A Hero of Our Time by Mikhail Lermontov, 1840

Passages

• You were to suffer your fate. That was not necessarily to know it

  — Henry James, The Beast in the Jungle

• I may assert Eternal Providence, And justify the ways of God to men

  — John Milton, Paradise Lost

• Fate in Greek Tragedy becomes the order of nature in modern thought

  — Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World

• In love, the heavens themselves do guide the state. Money buys lands, and wives are sold by fate

  — William Shakespeare, The Merry Wives of Windsor

• Arms, and the man I sing, who, forc’d by fate, And haughty Juno’s unrelenting hate, Expell’d and exil’d, left the Trojan shore

  — Virgil, The Aeneid

• we shall patiently bear the trials that fate imposes on us; we shall work for others without rest, both now and when we are old

  — Anton Chekhov, Uncle Vanya

Passages are verified quotations from the library that use one of these words: fate, destiny, providence, doom. Sentences under “From the texts” are copied word for word from the full texts in this library. Read each in its context on the work's page.