People regard bad luck as a kind of injustice. They secretly say with Louis XIV, when his armies were defeated in Flanders, “Has God forgotten all I have done for Him?”
The ancients reckoned a man’s luck, good or bad, among the gifts with which he is endowed by nature.
In very strong characters there is something which eludes analysis and defies definition, the very goad of destiny, driving them on their allotted paths with unrelenting and inevitable impulse. This is what the ancient Greeks, and among the moderns especially Goethe, recognized as the “demonic force.” It endows a life with dramatic unity and historic completeness.
Fate lies in fetters, so she no longer rules the stage.
The folly of some men turns out better than the foresight of others.