quotations about cause and effect
Connections slowly emerge. Like distant landmarks you are approaching, cause and effect begin to align themselves, draw closer together. Experiences too indefinite of outline in themselves to be recognized for themselves connect and are identified as a larger shape. And suddenly a light is thrown back, as when your train makes a curve, showing that there has been a mountain of meaning rising behind you on the way you've come, is rising there still, proven now through retrospect.
EUDORA WELTY
On Writing
All men, and all created nature, have been at work, from the beginning of time to this day, to produce the circumstances which now influence our actions. As soon as an act has been performed, it becomes independent of the individual performing it, and forthwith gives birth to some other act, which last gives birth to still another, and so they continue, and will continue, until the law of cause and effect shall cease to operate.
WILLIAM BATCHELDER GREENE
The Doctrine of Life
Thoughts become things through the principle of cause and effect. When you think certain thoughts repeatedly, you are planting a seed in the spiritual world that will bloom in the physical world.
CATHERINE WISHART
Teen Goddess: How to Look, Love & Live Like a Goddess
Do not exhaust yourself by efforts to trace back to original causes. Better accept them as inevitable and save your strength to fight against the effects.
GEORGE SAND
The Intimate Journal of George Sand
As we fail to locate the first cause that set in motion the cause and effect cycle, is it just possible that the first cause evolved from an inferior set of causes that did not have any effects?
RAJESH
Random Cosmos
The cause is hidden, but the result is known.
OVID
Metamorphoses
Karma is the universal law of cause and effect. You reap what you sow. You get what you earn. You are what you eat. If you give love, you get love. Revenge returns itself upon the avenger. What goes around comes around.
MARY T. BROWNE
The Power of Karma
Cause and effect, means and end, seed and fruit, cannot be severed; for the effect already blooms in the cause, the end pre-exists in the means, the fruit in the seed.
RALPH WALDO EMERSON
"Compensation", Essays, Lectures and Orations
To get at the cause for a thing, we must study the effect.
AGATHA CHRISTIE
The Mysterious Mr. Quin
Find out the cause of this effect,
Or rather say, the cause of this defect,
For this effect defective comes by cause.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
Hamlet
Each effect then is dependent on the cause which produces it, in so far as they are related as cause and effect. If the cause ceases to exercise its causality, the effect no longer takes place.
GEORGE HAYWARD JOYCE
Principles of Logic
Shallow men believe in luck, believe in circumstances: it was somebody's name, or he happened to be there at the time, or it was so then and another day it would have been otherwise. Strong men believe in cause and effect. The man was born to do it, and his father was born to be the father of him and of his deed; and by looking narrowly you shall see there was no luck in the matter; but it was all a problem in arithmetic, or an experiment in chemistry. The curve of the flight of the moth is preordained, and all things go by number, rule, and weight.
RALPH WALDO EMERSON
The Conduct of Life
There is no more dangerous error than confounding consequence with cause.
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE
Twilight of the Idols
Situations seem to happen to people, but in reality, they unfold from deeper karmic causes. The universe unfolds to itself, bringing to bear any cause that needs to be included. Don't take this process personally. The working out of cause and effect is eternal. You are part of this rising and falling that never ends, and only by riding the wave can you ensure that the waves don't drown you.
DEEPAK CHOPRA
The Book of Secrets: Unlocking the Hidden Dimensions of Your Life
So many of man's actions appear to have no immediate consequence but, concealed, do their work until finally all catches up and forms a complex web of cause and effect.
TOBSHA LEARNER
The Witch of Cologne
Skepticism is unbelief in cause and effect. A man does not see that as he eats, so he thinks; as he deals, so he is, and so he appears; he does not see that his son is the son of his thoughts and of his actions; that fortunes are not exceptions but fruits; that relation and connection are not somewhere and sometimes, but everywhere and always; no miscellany, no exemption, no anomaly--but method, and an even web; and what comes out, that was put in.
RALPH WALDO EMERSON
The Conduct of Life
Happy the man who has been able to learn the causes of things.
VIRGIL
Georgics
We require concepts such as cause and effect, although, as for their origins, they were invented as anthropomorphisms; we require atoms and molecules, etc. Whoever avoids abstractions must leave science alone.
SIGMUND FREUD
The Future of an Illusion
The popular belief in cause and effect is founded on the presupposition that free will is the cause of every effect: it is only from this that we derive the feeling of causality.
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE
The Will to Power
All things, both in the moral and intellectual world, are linked together upon the simple principle of cause and effect, by which one thing is the producer and the other the thing produced.
GEORGE CRABB
English Synonymes