Although often used interchangeably, the words "fate" and "destiny" have distinct connotations.
- Traditional usage defines fate as a power or agency that predetermines and orders the course of events. Fate defines events as ordered or "inevitable" and unavoidable. Classical and European mythology features three goddesses dispensing fate, known as Moirai in Greek mythology, as Parcae in Roman mythology, and as Norns in Norse mythology. They determine the events of the world through the mystic spinning of threads that represent individual human fates.
- Destiny is used with regard to the finality of events as they have worked themselves out; and to that same sense of "destination", projected into the future to become the flow of events as they will work themselves out.
In other words, "fate" relates to events of the future and present of an individual and in cases in literature unalterable, whereas "destiny" relates to the probable future. Fate implies no choice, but with destiny the entity participates in achieving an outcome that is directly related to itself. Participation happens willfully.
Read more about this topic: Destiny
Famous quotes containing the word fate:
“... it is not only our fate but our business to lose innocence, and once we have lost that it is futile to attempt a picnic in Eden.”
—Elizabeth Bowen (1899–1973)
“Slowly ... the truth is dawning upon women, and still more slowly upon men, that woman is no stepchild of nature, no Cinderella of fate to be dowered only by fairies and the Prince; but that for her and in her, as truly as for and in man, life has wrought its great experiences, its master attainments, its supreme human revelations of the stuff of which worlds are made.”
—Anna Garlin Spencer (1851–1931)
“My friends, whoever has had experience of evils knows how whenever a flood of ills comes upon mortals, a man fears everything; but whenever a divine force cheers on our voyage, then we believe that the same fate will always blow fair.”
—Aeschylus (525–456 B.C.)