It seems to be the fate of idealists to obtain what they have struggled for in a form which destroys their ideals.

Nature cannot be tricked or cheated. She will give up to you the object of your struggles only after you have paid her price.

I had faith in Israel before it was established, I have in it now. I believe it has a glorious future before it – not just another sovereign nation, but as an embodiment of the great ideals of our civilization.

The most incomprehensible thing about the world is that it is comprehensible.

Most gods throw dice, but Fate plays chess, and you don’t find out til too late that he’s been playing with two queens all along.

All generalizations are false, including this one.

Don’t be a writer; it’s a terrible way to live your life. There’s nothing to be gained from it but poverty and obscurity and solitude. So if you have a taste for all those things, which means that you really are burning to do it, then go ahead and do it. But don’t expect anything from anybody.

If life is a checker game, someone else is moving the pieces. It isn’t us. Don’t be surprised by amazing coincidences. There are no accidents. Consider, as I learned to do, the incredible interconnectedness of all of life.

There is no such thing as accident; it is fate misnamed.

I try to make it look easy, but the behind-the-scenes stuff is the challenge.

There’ll always be serendipity involved in discovery.

In this possibly terminal phase of human existence, democracy and freedom are more than just ideals to be valued – they may be essential to survival.

Gee, its lonesome in the outfield. It’s hard to keep awake with nothing to do.

I’m not somebody that thinks about destiny and fate, but I don’t walk away from it when something unfolds.

When an inner situation is not made conscious, it appears outside as fate.

Most of us experience a life full of wonderful moments and difficult moments. But for many of us, even when we are most joyful, there is fear behind our joy.

Fighting for one’s freedom, struggling towards being free, is like struggling to be a poet or a good Christian or a good Jew or a good Muslim or good Zen Buddhist. You work all day long and achieve some kind of level of success by nightfall, go to sleep and wake up the next morning with the job still to be done. So you start all over again.

Man never legislates, but destinies and accidents, happening in all sorts of ways, legislate in all sorts of ways.

It is what a man thinks of himself that really determines his fate.

War is the domain of physical exertion and suffering.

A black person grows up in this country – and in many places – knowing that racism will be as familiar as salt to the tongue. Also, it can be as dangerous as too much salt. I think that you must struggle for betterment for yourself and for everyone.

I struggled with being a broke college graduate, and while all my friends were getting career jobs, I was working horrible part-time jobs. That’s why now, even when I get tired, I think, ‚This is what I asked for.‘

A God without dominion, providence, and final causes, is nothing else but fate and nature.

There is no easy walk to freedom anywhere, and many of us will have to pass through the valley of the shadow of death again and again before we reach the mountaintop of our desires.

It I talked about Watergate, I was described as struggling to free myself from the morass. If I did not talk about Watergate, I was accused of being out of touch with reality.

A man’s character is his fate.

Life is essentially a cheat and its conditions are those of defeat; the redeeming things are not happiness and pleasure but the deeper satisfactions that come out of struggle.

I will seize fate by the throat; it shall certainly never wholly overcome me.

I know I do not exaggerate, unconsciously and unintentionally, the scantiness of my resources and the difficulty of my life… I know that, but for the mercy of God, I might easily have been, for any care that was taken of me, a little robber or a vagabond.

What nourishes me also destroys me.

Life is warfare.

Movies can and do have tremendous influence in shaping young lives in the realm of entertainment towards the ideals and objectives of normal adulthood.

Beautiful sentences pop into my head. Beautiful sentences that aren’t always absolutely accurate. Then, I have to choose between the beautiful sentence and being absolutely accurate. It can be a difficult choice.

Drink is the only opponent I have been unable to beat.

It was a Greek tragedy. Nixon was fulfilling his own nature. Once it started it could not end otherwise.

It is the stars, The stars above us, govern our conditions.

Actions are the seed of fate deeds grow into destiny.

I came in with Halley’s Comet in 1835. It is coming again next year, and I expect to go out with it. It will be the greatest disappointment of my life if I don’t go out with Halley’s Comet. The Almighty has said, no doubt: ‚Now here are these two unaccountable freaks; they came in together, they must go out together.‘

Ours is one continued struggle against degradation sought to be inflicted upon us by the European, who desire to degrade us to the level of the raw Kaffir, whose occupation is hunting and whose sole ambition is to collect a certain number of cattle to buy a wife with, and then pass his life in indolence and nakedness.

Our heritage and ideals, our code and standards – the things we live by and teach our children – are preserved or diminished by how freely we exchange ideas and feelings.

All men are prepared to accomplish the incredible if their ideals are threatened.

When it’s your time, it is your time.

It is also true that one can write nothing readable unless one constantly struggles to efface one’s own personality. Good prose is like a windowpane.

If you cannot understand that there is something in man which responds to the challenge of this mountain and goes out to meet it, that the struggle is the struggle of life itself upward and forever upward, then you won’t see why we go.

The die is cast.

The paradox of education is precisely this – that as one begins to become conscious one begins to examine the society in which he is being educated.

Strength does not come from winning. Your struggles develop your strengths. When you go through hardships and decide not to surrender, that is strength.

You either get tired fighting for peace, or you die.

I hate to see anybody sink. I hate to see anybody lose their dream, lose their home, something like that.

The way up and the way down are one and the same.

At the outset, I want to say that the suggestion that the struggle in South Africa is under the influence of foreigners or communists is wholly incorrect. I have done whatever I did because of my experience in South Africa and my own proudly felt African background, and not because of what any outsider might have said.

Today, all physicists know from studying Einstein and Bohr that sometimes an idea which looks completely paradoxical at first, if analyzed to completion in all detail and in experimental situations, may, in fact, not be paradoxical.

In the grip of a neurological disorder, I am fast losing control of words even as my relationship with the world has been reduced to them.

Why am I here? I’m not lucky. That’s God.

The slave is doomed to worship time and fate and death, because they are greater than anything he finds in himself, and because all his thoughts are of things which they devour.

We are continually shaped by the forces of coincidence.

Upon the education of the people of this country the fate of this country depends.

I was born in a very poor family. I used to sell tea in a railway coach as a child. My mother used to wash utensils and do lowly household work in the houses of others to earn a livelihood. I have seen poverty very closely. I have lived in poverty. As a child, my entire childhood was steeped in poverty.

Education comes from within; you get it by struggle and effort and thought.

Strength and growth come only through continuous effort and struggle.

‚American Graffiti‘ was unpleasant because of the fact that there was no money, no time, and I was compromising myself to death.