Virgil - Fate Quotes

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Endure the hardships of your present state,
Live, and reserve yourselves for better fate.

Virgil
Thus all below, whether by Nature's curse,
Or Fate's decree, degenerate still to worse:
So the boat's brawny crew the current stem,
And, slow advancing, struggle with the stream:
But if they slack their hands, or cease to strive,
Then down the flood with headlong haste they drive.

Virgil
Great queen, what you command me to relate
Renews the sad remembrance of our fate.

Virgil
My chief, let Fate cry on or back,
'Tis ours to follow, nothing slack:
Whatever betide, he only cures
The stroke of Fortune who endures.

Virgil
Alas, pitiable boy—if only you might break your cruel fate!—you are to be Marcellus. [People,] give me lilies in armfuls.

Virgil
O impotence of man's frail mind
To fate and to the future blind,
Presumptuous and o'erweening still
When Fortune follows at its will!

Virgil
The souls that throng the flood
Are those to whom, by Fate, are other bodies owed,
In Lethe's lake they long oblivion taste,
Of future life secure, forgetful of the past.

Virgil
Live and be blest! 'tis sweet to feel
Fate's book is closed and under seal.
For us, alas! that volume stern
Has many another page to turn.

Virgil
I yield to Fate, unwillingly retire,
And, loaded, up the hill convey my sire.

Virgil
Fate, and the dooming gods, are deaf to tears.

Virgil
An hour will come, with pleasure to relate
Your sorrows past, as benefits of Fate.

Virgil
Yet still despond not, but proceed
Along the path where Fate may lead.

Virgil
I sing of arms and of a man: his fate
had made him fugitive; he was the first
to journey from the coasts of Troy as far
as Italy and the Lavinian shores
Across the lands and waters he was battered
beneath the violence of the high ones for
the savage Juno's unforgetting anger.

Virgil