Passages about fate and freedom

Tell me, O Muse, of that ingenious hero who travelled far and wide after he had sacked the famous town of Troy.

I would rather be a paid servant in a poor man's house and be above ground than king of kings among the dead.

I sing of arms and of the man who first came, a fugitive by fate, from the coasts of Troy to Italy and the Lavinian shores.

Can there be such anger in the minds of the gods?

A prince who wants to keep his position must learn how not to be good, and must use that knowledge or hold it back as necessity requires.

Because men are ungrateful and break their bonds the moment it profits them, fear, which a prince controls, is a safer foundation than love, which he does not.

During the time men live without a common power to keep them all in awe, they are in that condition which is called war, and such a war as is of every man against every man.

And the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.

Sing, goddess, the anger of Peleus' son Achilleus and its devastation, which put pains thousandfold upon the Achaians.

As is the generation of leaves, so is that of humanity. The wind scatters the leaves on the ground, but the live timber burgeons with leaves again in the season of spring returning.

These are the researches of Herodotus of Halicarnassus, which he publishes, in the hope of thereby preserving from decay the remembrance of what men have done, and of preventing the great and wonderful actions of the Greeks and the Barbarians from losing their due meed of glory.

Solon tells Croesus that no one can be called happy while he still lives, since a god can throw down the most fortunate man at the end, and only a finished life can be judged.

Nothing in the world, or even out of it, can possibly be conceived which could be called good without qualification except a good will.

Act only according to that maxim whereby thou canst at the same time will that it should become a universal law.

Many things are terrible and wonderful, and nothing is more terrible and wonderful than man.

I was not born to share in hatred, but to share in love.

Count no man happy till he dies, free of pain at last.

Tiresias tells Oedipus that his wisdom is dreadful when it brings its possessor no profit, and refuses at first to say what he knows.

The real cause I consider to be the one which was formally most kept out of sight. The growth of the power of Athens, and the alarm which this inspired in Lacedaemon, made war inevitable.

For heroes have the whole earth for their tomb.

For it is not histories that I am writing, but lives.

A small thing, a phrase or a joke, often shows character better than battles with thousands of dead and the greatest sieges.

Zeus, who sets mortals on the way to understanding, has ordained the fixed law that wisdom comes by suffering.

The watchman on the roof says he has been lying there a year like a dog, learning the stars by heart, and that he would speak if the house could bear it, but an ox stands on his tongue.

Nature is a source or cause of being moved and of being at rest in that to which it belongs primarily, in virtue of itself and not in virtue of a concomitant attribute.

Motion is the fulfilment of what exists potentially, in so far as it exists potentially.

Of Man's first disobedience, and the fruit / Of that forbidden tree whose mortal taste / Brought death into the world, and all our woe

That to the height of this great argument / I may assert Eternal Providence, / And justify the ways of God to men.

All the objects of human reason or enquiry may naturally be divided into two kinds, to wit, Relations of Ideas, and Matters of Fact.

Custom, then, is the great guide of human life.

Poetry is a more philosophical and a higher thing than history: for poetry tends to express the universal, history the particular.

But the greatest thing by far is to be a master of metaphor. It is the one thing that cannot be learnt from others; and it is also a sign of genius, since a good metaphor implies an intuitive perception of the similarity in dissimilars.

Men are disturbed not by the things which happen, but by the opinions about the things.

Seek not that the things which happen should happen as you wish; but wish the things which happen to be as they are, and you will have a tranquil flow of life.

Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind.

Hitherto it has been assumed that all our knowledge must conform to objects. We must therefore make trial whether we may not have more success if we suppose that objects must conform to our knowledge.

Well, Prince, so Genoa and Lucca are now just family estates of the Buonapartes.

Above him there was now nothing but the sky, the lofty sky, not clear, but still immeasurably lofty, with grey clouds slowly creeping across it.

It's not God that I don't accept, Alyosha, I only most respectfully return Him the ticket.

Why hast Thou come now to hinder us?

Fair is foul, and foul is fair: / Hover through the fog and filthy air.

I have no spur / To prick the sides of my intent, but only / Vaulting ambition, which o'erleaps itself / And falls on th' other.

O dark, dark, dark, amid the blaze of noon, / Irrecoverably dark, total eclipse / Without all hope of day!

Eyeless in Gaza at the mill with slaves.

I saw him, I blushed, I turned pale at the sight of him.

It is Venus entire, fastened on her prey.

The nature of an individual substance is to have a notion so complete that it is sufficient to comprehend and to allow the deduction of all the predicates of the subject to which the notion is attributed.

Every substance is like a complete world and like a mirror of God or of the whole universe, which each one expresses in its own way.

Faith is precisely this paradox, that the single individual is higher than the universal.

He who loved himself became great by himself, and he who loved other men became great by his devotion, but he who loved God became greater than all.

A great ox stands upon my tongue.

Zeus, who sets mortals on the road to understanding, who made it law that by suffering they shall learn.

Pylades, what shall I do? Am I to feel shame at killing my mother?

Have pity, child, on this breast, where many times you drowsed and sucked the milk that made you.

My mind is bent to tell of bodies changed into new forms.

Her limbs grew heavy and numb, a thin bark closed over her breast, her hair became leaves, her arms branches; her feet, so swift a moment before, stuck fast in sluggish roots.

For I am not ashamed of the gospel of Christ: for it is the power of God unto salvation to every one that believeth; to the Jew first, and also to the Greek.

For the good that I would I do not: but the evil which I would not, that I do.

Our wisdom, in so far as it ought to be deemed true and solid wisdom, consists almost entirely of two parts: the knowledge of God and of ourselves.

Man's nature, so to speak, is a perpetual factory of idols.

This royal throne of kings, this sceptred isle, this earth of majesty, this seat of Mars, this other Eden, demi-paradise.

Not all the water in the rough rude sea can wash the balm off from an anointed king.

By God I mean an absolutely infinite being, that is, substance consisting of infinite attributes, each of which expresses eternal and infinite essence.

Men believe themselves free because they are conscious of their volitions and their desire, and do not think, even in their dreams, of the causes by which they are disposed to want and to will.

The monad is nothing but a simple substance which enters into composites; simple, that is to say, without parts.

Monads have no windows through which anything could come in or go out.

Call me Ishmael.

All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks. If man will strike, strike through the mask! How can the prisoner reach outside except by thrusting through the wall?

The pragmatic method is primarily a method of settling metaphysical disputes that otherwise might be interminable. What difference would it practically make to anyone if this notion rather than that notion were true?

Theories thus become instruments, not answers to enigmas, in which we can rest.

Behold what I, a god, suffer at the hands of gods.

In one short word, learn the whole of it: every art that mortals have comes from Prometheus.

Let no one delay the study of philosophy while young nor weary of it when old; for no one is either too young or too old for the health of the soul.

Death is nothing to us; for that which is dissolved is without sensation, and that which lacks sensation is nothing to us.

Of things some are in our power, and others are not. In our power are opinion, movement towards a thing, desire, aversion; and in a word, whatever are our own acts. Not in our power are the body, property, reputation, offices, and in a word, whatever are not our own acts.

Men are disturbed not by the things which happen, but by the opinions about the things.

For I, that God of Loves servantz serve, Ne dar to Love, for myn unliklynesse, Preyen for speed, al sholde I therfore sterve.

I am myn owene womman, wel at ese.

The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, / But in ourselves, that we are underlings.

Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears; / I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him.

Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and reverence, the more often and more steadily one reflects on them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.

Act so that the maxim of your will could always hold at the same time as a principle of a universal legislation.

Habit is thus the enormous fly-wheel of society, its most precious conservative agent. It alone is what keeps us all within the bounds of ordinance, and saves the children of fortune from the envious uprisings of the poor.

Consciousness, then, does not appear to itself chopped up in bits. Such words as chain or train do not describe it fitly as it presents itself in the first instance. It is nothing jointed; it flows. A river or a stream are the metaphors by which it is most naturally described.

A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.

It was an act of desperation. For six years I had struggled with the theory of black-body radiation. I knew the problem was fundamental and I knew the answer. I had to find a theoretical explanation at any price, however high.

But Jonah rose up to flee to Tarshish from the presence of the Lord.

Forty days more, and Nineveh shall be overthrown!

Saul was head and shoulders taller than any of the people. When Samuel said to all the people, Do you see him whom the Lord has chosen? there is none like him among all the people, all the people shouted, Long live the king!

You are the man! Thus says the Lord, the God of Israel: I anointed you king over Israel, and I rescued you from the hand of Saul. Why have you despised the word of the Lord, to do what is evil in his sight?

Merest breath, said Qohelet, merest breath. All is mere breath.

A generation goes and a generation comes, but the earth endures forever. And the sun rises and the sun sets, and to its place it pants, and rises there again.

Inwood and Gerson translate and number the fragments and reports from Diogenes Laertius, Cicero, Plutarch, Stobaeus, Sextus Empiricus and others, arranged by topic, logic, physics, ethics, reconstructing Stoic doctrine's systematic architecture from scattered secondary sources.

The collection is the standard way for students to read what the Stoics actually argued about fate, the passions, virtue and the rational cosmos, giving readers direct access to positions otherwise recoverable only through this careful scholarly reconstruction.

You have a right to your actions, but never to the fruits of your actions. Do not let the fruits be the motive for your actions, and do not let your attachment be to inaction.

The soul is never born, and never dies. It is not slain when the body is slain. Weapons cannot cut it, fire cannot burn it, water cannot wet it, wind cannot dry it away.

A Greek hostage in Rome set out to explain how Rome conquered nearly the whole known world in fifty-three years, from 220 to 167 BCE, treating this rapid conquest's speed and scope as the central historical puzzle requiring genuine explanation.

The surviving books cover the Punic Wars, Hannibal's crossing of the Alps and Cannae, the wars in Greece and Macedon, and the sack of Carthage, giving detailed access to the actual military campaigns through which Rome achieved its expansion.

Epictetus states that men are disturbed not by the things that happen, but by their opinions about the things that happen, so that death itself is nothing terrible, since if it were it would have appeared so to Socrates, but the terror lies entirely in our own judgment that death is terrible.

He compares life to a play whose length and character the author has already determined, and insists that our own task is simply to act well the part that has been given us, whether that part is short or long, a beggar's or a king's, since choosing the role is not up to us but acting it well entirely is.

Nothing makes the mind a companion of desire in seeking to enjoy such things except its own will and free choice. There is no other cause of evildoing than this.

Whatever it is by which the number four is understood to be greater than three, this is unchangeable and common to all who understand it, and so it cannot be private to any one mind, but must be common truth open to all rational minds alike.

I am Fortune. Inconstancy is my very essence, it is the game I never cease to play as I turn my wheel in its ever-changing circle.

No man can ever truly be secure until he has been abandoned by Fortune.

So. The Spear-Danes in days gone by and the kings who ruled them had courage and greatness. We have heard of those princes' heroic campaigns.

Often, for undaunted courage, fate spares the man it has not already marked.

Conaire is warned from the start that he must never let two of his foster-brothers commit robbery in his kingdom without punishment, and when circumstance eventually forces his hand against them, the exile he imposes plants the seed of the very vengeance that returns to destroy him.

Travelling toward the hostel of Dá Derga, Conaire finds himself compelled by a sequence of small circumstances, three red horsemen on the road, a hunting party, to break one geis after another, each transgression individually explicable and yet cumulatively fatal.

Marie names herself directly as the author of these twelve lais, stating that she is retelling stories she heard from Breton minstrels, a claimed source that frames her considerable shaping intelligence as preservation and translation rather than pure invention.

In Bisclavret, a knight who is secretly a werewolf is betrayed by his own wife, who steals his clothes to trap him permanently in wolf form, and the tale's actual moral center rests not in his lycanthropy itself but in her specific betrayal of his trust.

The Völuspá presents a seeress recounting the creation of the world and foretelling its destruction at Ragnarök within a single continuous vision, giving Norse mythology a comprehensive cosmic frame running from absolute beginning through prophesied end.

The Hávamál collects sayings attributed to Odin, blending everyday worldly wisdom about hospitality, friendship and caution directly alongside the god's own mythic self-sacrifice, refusing any clean separation between practical advice and cosmic religious knowledge.

Sigmund draws the sword that Odin thrust into the tree in Volsung's hall, which no other man could move, and the saga follows the sword through its breaking and reforging into the hand of his son Sigurd.

Sigurd kills the dragon Fafnir, wins its cursed gold, tastes its blood and understands the birds who warn him of Regin's treachery, and rides to wake the valkyrie Brynhild from her enchanted sleep.

Njal, a wise lawyer, and Gunnar of Hlidarendi, a formidable warrior, maintain a close friendship even as their wives Bergthora and Hallgerd feud with each other, a chain of killings and settlements running alongside the two men's own steady loyalty.

Gunnar is outlawed and killed at his home after refusing to leave Iceland as the law required, his attachment to his own land overriding clear knowledge of the danger this refusal would bring upon him.

Dante and Virgil emerge from Hell to see again the stars, and Dante writes that to course over better waters the small vessel of his talent now hoists sail, leaving behind so cruel a sea.

Virgil explains that neither Creator nor creature was ever without love, natural or of the mind, and that natural love is never in error, but the love of the mind can err in its object, or in too much or too little vigor.

It is time, sister, if you are not sleepy, to tell us one of your lovely little stories to while away the night.

Morning now dawned and Shahrazad broke off from what she had been allowed to say.

The king sits in Dunfermline town drinking his blood-red wine, and asks where he might find a good sailor to sail his ship, and an old knight names Sir Patrick Spens, who receives the king's letter and laughs once, then weeps, knowing the voyage the season demands will drown him.

Two ravens sit discussing, in a tone of complete and chilling indifference, where they shall dine, and settle on a newly slain knight lying behind an old turf wall, known to no one but his hawk, his hound and his lady, who has already taken another mate.

Richard, Duke of Gloucester, tells the audience he is determined to prove a villain and sets out to remove everyone between himself and the throne, giving the play's central antagonist unsettling self-aware intelligence about his own moral status.

He woos Lady Anne over the corpse of the husband he killed, has his brother Clarence drowned in a wine butt, and has his young nephews murdered in the Tower after seizing the crown, escalating villainy through calculated rhetorical and physical cruelty.

Romeo Montague crashes a Capulet feast and falls in love with Juliet Capulet, and they are married in secret by Friar Laurence the next day, their love's compressed timeframe giving it genuinely dangerous intensity from its very first meeting.

Romeo kills Juliet's cousin Tybalt to avenge his friend Mercutio and is banished, demonstrating how thoroughly the older generation's feud reasserts itself even within the younger generation's attempted escape from it through violent, inherited obligation.

What is life? A frenzy. What is life? An illusion, a shadow, a fiction, and the greatest good is small, for all of life is a dream, and dreams themselves are a dream.

I dream that I am here, weighed down by these chains, and I dreamed that I saw myself in another, more flattering state. What is life? A frenzy.

The Discourse on Metaphysics, addressed initially to Arnauld and developed further through their subsequent correspondence, works through Leibniz's central concept of substance, establishing the philosophical groundwork that his mature theory of monads would later build upon and extend.

Leibniz describes the monad as simple, indivisible and windowless, containing no parts through which anything could genuinely enter or leave, yet argues that each monad nonetheless represents the entire universe from its own unique perspective, a striking combination of total isolation and total representation.

Johnson surveys mankind's actual desires across a geographic sweep from China to Peru, wealth, political power, learning, military glory, long life and beauty, arguing that each specific object of desire ultimately betrays those who actually succeed in obtaining it rather than merely those who fail to reach it.

Cardinal Wolsey rises to the height of political power before falling catastrophically, his eventual ruin serving as the poem's central English example demonstrating how political ambition, even when fully and successfully achieved, carries the mechanism of its own eventual betrayal within it.

Squire Allworthy discovers an infant left in his own bed, and, moved by the child's helplessness, resolves to raise him as his own despite knowing nothing of his actual parentage, naming him Tom Jones and raising him alongside his sister's son Blifil as presumptive co-heirs to his estate.

Blifil's carefully managed scheming, presented outwardly as pious concern for his uncle's welfare and Tom's own moral correction, gradually poisons Squire Allworthy's opinion of Tom until Tom is banished from the household entirely, a banishment the narrator makes clear stems from Blifil's calculated self-interest rather than any genuine moral failing serious enough to warrant it.

Rasselas grows restless in the Happy Valley, an enclosed paradise where the royal children of Abyssinia are kept in engineered luxury specifically to prevent any restlessness, and finds that this manufactured contentment produces not happiness but a specific, gnawing dissatisfaction he cannot suppress or explain away.

Rasselas escapes with his sister Nekayah, her maid Pekuah, and the poet Imlac, and the group undertakes a systematic examination of different ways of living, the rich, the pastoral life, the hermit's withdrawal, and the reasoning philosopher, testing each option directly through observation rather than abstract argument alone.

William of Orange warns Egmont repeatedly that the Duke of Alba's arrival in Brussels signals real, immediate danger, and urges him to flee while he still can, but Egmont, trusting in his own popularity and his personal standing with the king, dismisses the warning and remains.

Klärchen, Egmont's lover, attempts to rouse the citizens of Brussels to rise in his defense once he has been arrested, and when the crowd fails to act, overwhelmed by fear of Alba's forces, she despairs entirely and takes poison rather than continue living without him.

Hansel and Gretel, abandoned in the forest by parents who can no longer feed them, follow a trail of breadcrumbs that birds eat before they can retrace their steps, and are lured by hunger to a house made of bread, cake and sugar belonging to a witch who intends to eat them.

Cinderella's stepmother and stepsisters mutilate their own feet, cutting off toe and heel, in a failed attempt to fit the golden slipper, and at the wedding birds peck out the stepsisters' eyes as punishment for their cruelty, a considerably harsher conclusion than most later popular versions retain.

War is nothing but the continuation of policy by other means, and this fundamental relationship, Clausewitz insists, must never be lost from view no matter how the specific character or scale of a war might vary.

War is more than a true chameleon that slightly adapts its characteristics to the given case, since in its objective nature it is a fascinating trinity, composed of primordial violence, hatred and enmity, the play of chance and probability, and its element of subordination as an instrument of policy, which makes it subject to reason alone.

Fabrizio del Dongo, a young Lombard aristocrat, runs off to fight for Napoleon and wanders lost across the field of Waterloo without understanding what he sees, deflating epic military legend through a naive young participant's confused, fragmentary experience.

His aunt Gina, the Duchess Sanseverina, and her lover Count Mosca, the prime minister of Parma, manoeuvre to advance Fabrizio in the Church, demonstrating how personal advancement depends on calculated intrigue rather than genuine merit or vocation.

The British expel the French settlers of Acadia in Nova Scotia in 1755, separating Evangeline from her betrothed Gabriel on their own wedding day, the poem's founding catastrophe that launches her years-long search across the American landscape.

Evangeline searches for Gabriel across Louisiana, the western prairies and the Ozarks, arriving again and again just after he has already moved on, a repeated pattern of near-miss that becomes the poem's central emotional structure across her years of devoted searching.

Isolde, brought to Cornwall as bride for King Marke by the man who killed her betrothed, means to poison them both, but her servant Brangäne substitutes a love potion, and they drink believing it is death.

In the king's garden by night the lovers sing that day is the realm of illusion and honour, and night the realm of truth, and long to sink into the night together and be free of the world.

After ten years alone on a mountain, the sage Zarathustra descends to teach that God is dead, that man is something to be overcome, and that the overman is the meaning of the earth, beginning his difficult mission among a humanity unready to receive it.

Through speeches, parables and encounters with disciples, a tightrope walker, a soothsayer and a menagerie of higher men, Zarathustra works out the implications of his teaching, discovering how difficult genuine transformation of values actually proves in practice.

Pure duration is the form which the succession of our conscious states assumes when our ego lets itself live, when it refrains from separating its present state from its former states.

We are free when our acts spring from our whole personality, when they express it, when they have that indefinable resemblance to it which one sometimes finds between the artist and his work.

Marcher confides to May Bartram his lifelong secret conviction that something rare and strange, some extraordinary fate, is reserved specifically for him, crouching like a beast in the jungle and waiting to spring, and she agrees to watch and wait for it alongside him.

Across years of quiet companionship, May comes to love Marcher, a devotion he fails entirely to notice, so thoroughly absorbed in watching for his own extraordinary fate that the actual, available relationship developing directly in front of him passes completely unrecognized.

The impetus of life, of which we are speaking, consists in a need of creation. It cannot create absolutely, because it is confronted with matter, that is to say with the movement that is the inverse of its own. But it seizes upon this matter, which is necessity itself, and strives to introduce into it the largest possible amount of indetermination and liberty.

The eye of a mollusc such as the scallop, for example, though it is not fundamentally different in structure from the eye of a vertebrate, has been formed independently, through a wholly different series of stages, and this convergence toward the same complex result is what mechanism cannot easily explain.

In an Austrian village in 1590 three boys meet a beautiful youth who calls himself Satan, nephew of the fallen angel, who makes a tiny castle and its people out of clay and then crushes them when they annoy him.

Satan shows the boys the wretchedness of human life, the cruelty of the moral sense, which alone makes it possible to choose wrong, and the meaninglessness of any human choice, each life a chain fixed by its first link.

Freud observes that the patient does not remember anything of what he has forgotten and repressed, but acts it out, reproducing it not as a memory but as an action, repeating it without, of course, knowing that he is repeating it.

He identifies transference, the patient's relationship to the analyst himself, as the primary field in which this repetition actually plays out, arguing that the analyst must allow the patient's repressed material to unfold within this relationship rather than attempting to short-circuit the process through direct explanation alone.