Fate.................

"The riddle of the age has for each a private solution."

"Wise men feel that there is something which cannot be
talked or voted away, - a strap or belt which girds the world."

"But Nature is no sentimentalist, - does not cosset or pamper
us.  We must see that the world is rough and surly, and will
not mind drowning a man or a women; but swallows your
ship like a grain of dust."

"Providence has a wild, rough, incalculable road to its end,
and it is of no use to whitewash its huge, mixed instrument-
alities, or to dress up that terrific benefactor in a clean
shirt and white neckcloth of a student of divinity."

"'Tis weak and vicious people who cast blame on Fate.  The
right use of Fate is to bring up our conduct to the loftiness
of nature."

"'Tis the best use of Fate to teach a fatal courage.  Go face
the fire at sea, or cholera in your friend's house, or the burglar
in your own, or what danger lies in the way of duty, knowing
you are guarded by the cherubim of Destiny. If you believe in
Fate to your harm, believe it, at least, for your good."

"Fate, then, is a name for facts yet not passed under the fire
of thought; - for causes which are unpenetrated........The
annual slaughter from typhus far exceeds that of war; but the
right drainage destroys typhus.  The plague in the sea-service
from scurvy is healed by lemon juice and other diets portable
or procurable:..............and every other pest is not less in the
chain of cause and effect, and may be fought off."

"The secret of the world is, the tie between person and event. 
Person makes event, and event person."

"The pleasure of life is according to the man that lives it, and
not according to the work or the place.  Life is an ecstasy."

"A man's fortunes are the fruit of his character.  A man's
friends are his magnetisms."

"History is the action and reaction of these two, - Nature and
Thought; - two boys pushing each other on the curbstone of
the pavement.  Everything is pusher or pushed: and matter
and mind are in perpetual tilt and balance, so."

"And the moral is, that what we seek we shall find; what we
flee from flees from us; as Goethe said, 'what we wish for in
youth, comes in heaps on us in old age,' too often cursed with
the granting of our prayer: and hence the high caution, that
since we are sure of having what we wish, we beware to ask
only for high things."

-all quotes excerpted from Ralph Waldo Emerson's
essay, Fate.