“There is a tide in the affairs of men,
Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;
Omitted, all the voyage of their life
Is bound in shallows and in miseries.”
“Isabel was a young person of many theories; her imagination was remarkably active. It had been her fortune to possess a finer mind than most of the persons among whom her lot was cast . . .”
“Fortune . . . shows her power where valour has not prepared to resist her, and thither she turns her forces where she knows that barriers and defences have not been raised to constrain her.”
“Not to extinguish our free will, I hold it to be true that Fortune is the arbiter of one-half of our actions, but that she still leaves us to direct the other half.”
“Abandon anything about your life and habits that might be holding you back, Learn to create your own opportunities. Know that there is no finish line; fortune favors action.”
“And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor”
“..the early Christians... Willingly they sacrificed fame, fortune and life itself on behalf of the cause they knew to be right. Quantitatively small, they were qualitatively giants.”
“Early Christian...Willingly they sacrificed fame, fortune and life itself on behalf of the cause they knew to be right. Quantitatively small, they were qualitatively giants. Their powerful gospel put an end to such barbaric evils as infanticide and bloody gladiatorial contests.”
“Romans, make way. The good Andronicus,
Patron of virtue, Rome’s best champion,
Successful in the battles that he fights,
With honour and with fortune is return’d.”
“One day he lost sight of his retinue in a great forest. These forests are very useful in delivering princes from their courtiers, like a sieve that keeps back the bran. Then the princes get away to follow their fortunes. In this they have the advantage of the princesses, who are forced to marry before they have had a bit of fun. I wish our princesses got lost in a forest sometimes.”
“To the young American, here or elsewhere, the paths to fortune are innumerable and all open; There is invitation in the air and success in all his wide horizon.”
“I hope that this fortune-telling gift the stone seems to have given you is as accurate as your bow’s arrows. If you are wrong, I am afraid a curse will follow us like the Devil’s shadow follows a possessed mortal’s flesh.”
“One piece of good fortune never comes alone. Take my word for it, the nut Krakatuk isn’t the only thing we’ve found; we’ve also found the young man who’s going to crack it between his teeth and give Princess Pirlipat the beauty kernel. I am referring to none other than your cousin’s son,”
“Peradventure this is not Fortune’s work neither, but Nature’s, who perceiveth our natural wits too dull to reason of such goddesses, and hath sent this natural for our whetstone, for always the dullness of the fool is the whetstone of the wits.”
“They reminded me that it was my fate to pursue only phantoms, creatures whose reality existed to a great extent in my imagination; for there are people - and this had been my case since youth - for whom all the things that have a fixed value, assessable by others, fortune, success, high positions, do not count; what they must have is phantoms. They sacrifice all the rest, devote all their efforts, make everything else subservient to the pursuit of some phantom. But this soon fades away; then they run after another only to return later on to the first.”
“And perhaps we practice because we feel as if there’s nothing else we can do, because sometimes it feels as if life is governed by the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.”
“Ever since the age of five, when her parents had been killed, she had been anxious- understandably- as to what was become of her, and had looked for her fortune in every teacup, and every fireback.”
″ ‘I know a number of funy things,’ says th lady. ‘I have been at some people’s christenings, and turned away from other folks’ doors. I have seen some people spoilt by good fortune, and others, as I hope, improved by hardship. I advise you to stay at the town where the coach stops for the night. Stay there and study, and remember your old friend to whom you were kind.′ ”
We have our clothes, some more splendid than others,—this is our credit; but when a man dies he has only his skin; in the same way, on retiring from business, you have nothing but your real principal of about five or six millions, at the most; for third-rate fortunes are never more than a fourth of what they appear to be, like the locomotive on a railway, the size of which is magnified by the smoke and steam surrounding it.