Quotes & Sayings About Cause And Effect

For the Universe has three children, born at one time, which reappear under different names in every system of thought, whether they be called cause, operation and effect; or, more poetically, Jove, Pluto, Neptune; or, theologically, the Father, the Spirit and the Son; but which we will call here the Knower, the Doer and the Sayer. These stand respectively for the love of truth, for the love of good, and for the love of beauty. These three are equal. Each is that which he is, essentially, so that he cannot be surmounted or analyzed, and each of these three has the power of the others latent in him and his own, patent. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

I can't say I know at this moment what all these laws are. But on some level everybody knows that we are all getting exactly what we deserve. — Thaddeus Golas

Disruptive technology is a theory. It says this will happen and this is why; it's a statement of cause and effect. In our teaching we have so exalted the virtues of data-driven decision making that in many ways we condemn managers only to be able to take action after the data is clear and the game is over. In many ways a good theory is more accurate than data. It allows you to see into the future more clearly. — Clayton Christensen

No game in the world is as tidy and dramatically neat as baseball, with cause and effect, crime and punishment, motive and result, so cleanly defined. — Paul Gallico

Alas ... I too have known love, that ruler of hearts, that soul of our soul: it's never brought me anything except one kiss and twenty kicks in the rump. How could such a beautiful cause produce such an abominable effect on you? — Voltaire

You can easily see that if you are regularly nasty to your loved one, it won't be long before cause and effect sets in and undermines your relationship. The reverse is also true: if you are unceasingly caring and loving to your loved one and act with the Laws of Love in mind, you will be deeply loved in return and your relationship will thrive. — Chris Prentiss

One is in a state of hope because the basic physiological feeling is once again strong and rich; one trusts in God because the feeling of fullness and strength gives a sense of rest. Morality and religion belong entirely to the psychology of error: in every single case, cause and effect are confused; or truth is confused with the effects of believing something to be true; or a state of consciousness is confused with its physiological origins. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Some people are comfortable talking about their lives, as if they can make sense of the progression of random events that made them what they are. This involves a kind of forward-looking faith in life; a conviction that cause and effect are linked, and that they are themselves more than the sum of their past. — Anna Funder

Your religious book(s) mentioned the power of mind thousands of years ago so WHY do you have to wait until the science proves it in the 21st century? Let others wait to realize/prove the facts not you. — Maddy Malhotra

You can never know if a person forgives you when you wrong them. Therefore it is existentially important to you. It is a question you are intensely concerned with. Neither can you know whether a person loves you. It's something you just have to believe or hope. But these things are more important to you than the fact that the sum of the angles in a triangle is 180 degrees. You don't think about the law of cause and effect or about modes of perception when you are in the middle of your first kiss. — Jostein Gaarder

For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side effect of one's personal dedication to a cause greater than oneself. — Viktor E. Frankl

Where no bondage is, there is no cause and effect. — Swami Vivekananda

Cause and effect, the riddle of all history, is a particular devil in financial history; and never more so than today, where entire classes of security are collapsing not on public exchanges and stock-tickers but because there are no markets to establish prices this side of nothing. — James Buchan

Cause and effect is the basis of my education, leading me to an essence far more profound than any rule of societal conditioning. — Ka Chinery

I've got the greatest job in the world. There's no other job in government where cause and effect is so tightly coupled where you can make a difference every day in so many different ways and in so many different people's lives. It's a great challenge. — Michael Bloomberg

Like it or not, sin has consequences. Which is why God lovingly warns us against it. Thankfully, He is merciful and ready to forgive if we ask Him. But that doesn't erase natural consequences of our actions. Cause and effect."
"The Secret of Pembrooke Park. — Julie Klassen

Arise without conditions, away from cause and effect, when the whole of existence is conditioned and relative, and is within the law of cause and effect? — Walpola Rahula

Vanity is illustrated in the cause and effect of love, as in the case of Cleopatra. — Blaise Pascal

Simplicity is a kind of transparency in which subtle nuances can have outsize effects. — David Byrne

Again, if all movement is always interconnected, the new arising from the old in a determinate order - if the atoms never swerve so as to originate some new movement that will snap the bonds of fate, the everlasting sequence of cause and effect - what is the source of the free will possessed by living things throughout the earth? — Titus Lucretius Carus

Support is not always easy to come by if you wait for the world to see your worth. Discover your own worth and the world will indeed follow your lead. Its the law of cause and effect! It has to happen. Support yourself. — Sereda Aleta Dailey

If you do things with a certain type of result and cause a certain type of reaction or effect, then you increase your market value. It's very much a competition for the entertainment dollar, and that's never been more clearly evident than in today's NBA game. — Julius Erving

That is the most basic law of the Universe - cause and effect. If our actions are the result of our intentions to do good, to create harmony, to deal fairly, to love dearly, and to live the life of the superior person, can anything else happen except that, as a result of natural law, we reach the loftiest goals to which one can attain and lead lives of greatest happiness? — Wu Wei

If we see a house, CLEANTHES, we conclude, with the greatest certainty, that it had an architect or builder; because this is precisely that species of effect which we have experienced to proceed from that species of cause. But surely you will not affirm, that the universe bears such a resemblance to a house, that we can with the same certainty infer a similar cause, or that the analogy is here entire and perfect. — David Hume

All science is concerned with the relationship of cause and effect. Each scientific discovery increases man's ability to predict the consequences of his actions and thus his ability to control future events. — Laurence J. Peter

By becoming interested in the cause, we are less likely to dislike the effect. — Dale Carnegie

human being falsely identifies himself with his physical form because the life currents from the soul are breath-conveyed into the flesh with such intense power that man mistakes the effect for a cause, and idolatrously imagines the body to have life of its own. Man's — Paramahansa Yogananda

To produce a primary [karmic] cause which is potentially capable of having an effect, three things are necessary: intention, the actual action, and then satisfaction. — Namkhai Norbu

Control is as much an effect as a cause, and the idea that control is something you exert is a real handicap to progress — Steve Grand

In whatever system where the weight attached to the wheel should be the cause of motion of the wheel, without any doubt the center of the gravity of the weight will stop beneath the center of its axle. No instrument devised by human ingenuity, which turns with its wheel, can remedy this effect. Oh, speculators about perpetual motion, how many vain chimeras have you created in the like quest. Go and take you place with the seekers after gold. — Leonardo Da Vinci

Under no circumstances should you lose hope. Hopelessness is a real cause of failure. Remember, you can overcome any problem. Be calm, even when the external environment is confused or complicated; it will have little effect if your mind is at peace. On the other hand, if your mind gives way to anger, then even when the world is peaceful and comfortable, peace of mind will elude you. — Dalai Lama XIV

It's gone too far: She's out there," I repeat in my head. Very plain, and without reality. I can't grasp the context. Cause has effect by the tail and is about to swallow it whole. I get up and go to the kitchen. — Haruki Murakami

(7) Evolution contradicts the scientific law that no effect can be greater than its cause, since it assumes that intelligence was developed from non-intelligent matter, that morality was evolved from nonmoral processes, that love and other emotional qualities came out of unfeeling chemicals, that infinitely complex structures arose from simple beginnings, and that spiritual consciousness began out of inert molecules. — Henry Morris

It's just a playing field crammed full of cause and effect, billions of dominoes, each knocking over billions more, setting off trillions of actions every second. — Meg Rosoff

Whenever you appreciate a certain thing you become conscious of its real quality, and whenever you become conscious of the quality of anything, you begin to develop that quality in yourself. When we appreciate the worth of a person, we tend to impress the idea of that worth in our own minds, and thereby cause the same effect to be produced, in a measure, in ourselves. — Christian D. Larson

Yet we act as if simple cause and effect is at work. We push to find the one simple reason things have gone wrong. We look for the one action, or the one person, that created this mess. As soon as we find someone to blame, we act as if we've solved the problem. — Margaret J. Wheatley

When two things occur successively we call them cause and effect if we believe one event made the other one happen. If we think one event is the response to the other, we call it a reaction. If we feel that the two incidents are not related, we call it a mere coincidence. If we think someone deserved what happened, we call it retribution or reward, depending on whether the event was negative or positive for the recipient. If we cannot find a reason for the two events' occurring simultaneously or in close proximity, we call it an accident. Therefore, how we explain coincidences depends on how we see the world. Is everything connected, so that events create resonances like ripples across a net? Or do things merely co-occur and we give meaning to these co-occurrences based on our belief system? Lieh-tzu's answer: It's all in how you think. — Liezi

The deduction of effect from cause is often blocked by some insuperable extrinsic obstacle: the true causes may be quite unknown. Nowhere in life is this so common as in war, where the facts are seldom fully known and the underlying motives even less so. — Carl Von Clausewitz

I followed the curve that rose from the capitals of the semicircle of columns and ran along the ribs of the vault toward the key, mirroring the mystery of the ogive, that supreme static hypocrisy which rests on an absence, making the columns believe that they are thrusting the great ribs upward and the ribs believe that they are holding the columns down, the vault being both all and noting, at once cause and effect. — Umberto Eco

The will is not free - it is a phenomenon bound by cause and effect - but there is something behind the will which is free. — Swami Vivekananda

There's a reason humans peg-out around eighty: prose fatigue. It looks like organ failure or cancer or stroke but it's really just the inability to carry on clambering through the assault course of mundane cause and effect. If we ask Sheila then we can't ask Ron. If I have the kippers now then it's quiche for tea. Four score years is about all the ifs and thens you can take. Dementia's the sane realisation you just can't be doing with all that anymore. — Glen Duncan

Money will always remain an effect and refuse to replace you as the cause. Money is the product of virtue, but it will not give you virtue and it will not redeem your vices. Money will not give you the unearned, neither in matter nor in spirit. Is this the root of your hatred of money? — Ayn Rand

The unlimited creativity of humanity has created cruelty so chilling that death itself has become a welcomed and kind benefactor. — Bryant McGill

[English] fails me utterly when I attempt to describe what I love about Greek, that language innocent of all quirks and cranks; a language obsessed with action, and with the joy of seeing action multiply from action, action marching relentlessly ahead and with yet more actions filing in from either side to fall into neat step at the rear, in a long straight rank of cause and effect toward what will be inevitable, the only possible end. — Donna Tartt

An emotion is an automatic response, an automatic effect of man's value premises. An effect, not a cause. There is no necessary clash, no dichotomy between man's reason and his emotions — Ayn Rand

Nothing's random. Even if it looks that way, it's just because you don't know the causes. — Johnny Rich

Everybody in those days was a foreigner, no matter where they were born; as industrial modernization had its way with people and places, no one was native to the transformation of the United States from an agricultural economy to the foremost industrial power in the world--the factory being both the cause and the effect of an act of becoming, the likes of which nobody had ever seen before. — Jerry Herron

Empathy with someone else's pain or lack and a desire to help need to be balanced with a deeper realization of the eternal nature of all life and the illusion of all pain. Then let your peace flow into whatever you do, and you will be working on the levels of effect and cause simultaneously. — Eckhart Tolle

Time travel offends our sense of cause and effect - but maybe the universe doesn't insist on cause and effect. — Edward M. Lerner

Nothing in all Nature is more certain than the fact that no single thing or event can stand alone. It is attached to all that has gone before it, and it will remain attached to all that will follow it. It was born of some cause, and so it must be followed by some effect in an endless chain. — Julian Johnson

Fancy has an extensive influence in morals. Some of the most powerful and dangerous feelings in nature, as those of ambition and envy, derive their principal nourishment from a cause apparently so trivial. Its effect on the common affairs of life is greater than might be supposed. Naked reality would scarcely keep the world in motion. — William Benton Clulow

Try to visualize all the streams of human interaction, of communication. All those linking streams flowing in and between people, through text, pictures, spoken words and TV commentaries, streams through shared memories, casual relations, witnessed events, touching pasts and futures, cause and effect. Try to see this immense latticework of lakes and flowing streams, see the size and awesome complexity of it. This huge rich environment. This waterway paradise of all information and identities and societies and selves. — Steven Hall

Everything else you see and experience in this world is effect, and that includes your feelings. The cause is always your thoughts. — Rhonda Byrne

The wealth of the well-to-do of an industrial society is both the cause and effect of the masses' well-being. — Ludwig Von Mises

Social economic problems do not exist everywhere that an economic event plays a role as cause or effect - since problems arise only where the significance of those factors is problematical and can be precisely determined only through the application of methods of social-economics. — Max Weber

I think about how people use the devil as an alias for the things they fear. The cause and effect is backward. The devil doesn't make anyone do anything. People just do things and blame the devil after. — David Levithan

Children accept many things adults will not accept, since the world of a child is a constant revelation without any need for knowledge of cause and effect. ("Miss Esperson") — August Derleth

Men have been found to deny woman intellect; they have credited her with instinct, with intuition, with a capacity to correlate cause and effect much as a dog connects its collar with a walk. — W. L. George

Time of course has showed the question up in all its young illogic. We can justify any apologia simply by calling life a successive rejection of personalities. No apologia I s any more than a romance - half a fiction - in which all the successive identities are taken on and rejected by the writer as a function of linear time are treated as separate characters. The writing itself even constitutes another rejection, another "character" added to the past. So we do sell our souls: paying them away to history in little installments. It isn't so much to pay for eyes clear enough to see past the fiction of continuity, the fiction of cause and effect, the fiction of a humanized history endowed with "reason. — Thomas Pynchon

Reality does not easily give up meaning; it's the biographer's job to clobber it into submission. You're meant not only to tame it but to extract substance, to identify cause and axiomatic effect. You subsist on the tactical omissions, the hollow words, the oddly unconnected dots. — Stacy Schiff

I know this love, that sovereign of hearts, that soul of our souls; yet it never cost me more than a kiss and twenty kicks on the backside. How could this beautiful cause produce in you an effect so abominable. — Voltaire

On this simple unit-system [of building blocks] ruled on the low table-top all these forms were combined by the child into imaginative patter. Design was recreation! ... The virtue of all this lay in the awakening of the childmind to rhythmic structure in Nature - giving the child a sense of innate cause-and-effect otherwise far beyond child-comprehension. — Frank Lloyd Wright

If the selflessness of phenomena is analyzed and if this analysis is cultivated, it causes the effect of attaining nirvana. through no other cause does one come to peace. — Gautama Buddha

Sometimes, cause and effect are centuries apart — Rebecca Solnit

Tragedy is an imitation not only of a complete action, but of events inspiring fear and pity. Such an effect is best produced when the events come on us by surprise; and the effect is heightened when, at the same time, they follow as cause and effect. The tragic wonder will then be great than if they happened of themselves or by accident; for even coincidences are most striking when they have an air of design. — Aristotle.

Though in this world there are phenomena that might justly be termed "strange," there are no phenomena that cannot -- given sufficient information -- be explained. This is not to suggest that for every effect there is a cause, of course. That is an assumption that we are not prepared to make, less it launch us ineluctably down the path of determinism. This is only to suggest, rather, that there is no "thing" that exists without some relation to at least one other "thing," and it is the matrix of a "thing's" relationship that determines its meaning in the larger context of the world. Even something strange can be explained by tracing its relational lines of flight, however casual or casual they may be. — Dustin Long

Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward - reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them.
In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know. — Michael Crichton

But to measure cause and effect ... you must ensure that a simple correlation, however tempting it may be, is not mistaken for a cause. In the 1990s the stork population of Germany increased and the German at-home birth rate rose as well. Shall we credit storks for airlifting the babies? — Neil DeGrasse Tyson

A timeline is a linear representation of cause and effect, changing one event alters all that follow. — J.W. Lord

There's more to life than cause and effect. — Amy Zhang

Karma literally means "deed" or "act" and more broadly names the universal principle of cause and effect, action and reaction which governs all life. Karma is a natural law of the mind, just as gravity is a law of matter. — Satguru Sivaya Subramuniyaswami

To achieve peace, destruction is delivered. To give the gift of freedom, one promises eternal imprisonment. Adjudication obviates the need for justice. This is a studied, deliberate embrace of diametric opposition. It is a belief in balance, a belief asserted with the conviction of religion. But in this case, the proof of a god's power lies not in the cause but in the effect. Accordingly, in this world and in all others, proof is achieved by action, and therefore all action - including the act of choosing inaction - is inherently moral. No deed stands outside the moral context. At the same time, the most morally perfect act is the one taken in opposition to what has occurred before. — Steven Erikson

If you doubt what you have asked for in your prayers, then you commit a big sin because you doubt the abilities of God. — Maddy Malhotra

The justification for those actions was that we were living in a very hard, predatory, cloak-and-dagger world and that the only way to deal with a totalitarian enemy was to intimidate him. The trouble with this theory was that while we live in a world of plot and counterplot, we also live in a world of cause and effect. Whatever the cause for the decision to legitimize and regularize deceit abroad, the inevitable effect was the practice of deceit at home. — Norman Cousins

All the things and events we usually consider as irreconcilable, such as cause and effect, past and future, subject and object, are actually just like the crest and trough of a single wave, a single vibration. For a wave, although itself a single event, only expresses itself through the opposites of crest and trough, high point and low point. For that very reason, the reality is not found in the crest nor the trough alone, but in their unity ... — Ken Wilber

In order to understand why one chooses to be a Tantric practitioner, there has to be an understanding of cause and effect, cyclic existence, the awareness that the reality that we think we are seeing is not reality as it really truly is. So enlightenment is seeing reality with bare awareness, non-conceptual reality. — Zeena Schreck

There is a new science of complexity which says that the link between cause and effect is increasingly difficult to trace; that change (planned or otherwise) unfolds in non-linear ways; that paradoxes and contradictions abound; and that creative solutions arise out of diversity, uncertainty and chaos. — Andy Hargreaves

Life is not made of atoms,it is merely built out of them. What life is actually 'made of' is cycles of cause and effect, loops of causal flow. These phenomenon are just as real as atoms - perhaps even more real. If anything, the entire universe is actually made from events, of which atoms are merely some of the consequences. — Steve Grand

Maybe the thing that we're losing is the very thing that has caused us to lose everything else in the first place. — Craig D. Lounsbrough

Every thought, feeling, and emotion creates a molecule known as a neuropeptide. Neuropeptides travel throughout your body and hook onto receptor sites of cells and neurons. Your brain takes in the information, converts it into chemicals, and lets your whole body know if there's trouble in the world or cause for celebration. Your body is directly influenced as these molecules course through the bloodstream, delivering the energetic effect of whatever your brain is thinking and feeling. — Deepak Chopra

Man doeth this and doeth that from the good or evil of his heart; but he knows not to what end his sense doth prompt him; for when he strikes he is blind to where the blow shall fall, nor can he count the airy threads that weave the web of circumstance. Good and evil, love and hate, night and day, sweet and bitter, man and woman, heaven above and the earth beneath
all those things are needful, one to the other, and who knows the end of each? — H. Rider Haggard

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

Reach isn't describable in terms of cause and effect anymore: it's simultaneous. — Jennifer Egan

I shiver, thinking how easy it is to be totally wrong about people-to see one tiny part of them and confuse it for the whole, to see the cause and think it's the effect or vice versa — Lauren Oliver

The cultivation - even celebration - of victimhood by intellectuals, tort lawyers, politicians and the media is both cause and effect of today's culture of complaint. — George Will

Ignorance' (absence of Self-Knowledge) creates vibrations (causes) and 'Knowledge' (Self-Knowledge) stops these vibrations. — Dada Bhagwan

Somedays you're the cue ball, somedays you are the eight ball — Pablo

The line changed my life 'cause I thought of some poor woman I hadn't even met walking around the United States or the world not knowing she's going to be beaten up by me and these kids, unborn, not knowing they were going to be born into the family of a child-beater just because I was. So it really did have a great effect on me. — Terry Gross

The world outside of me has no meaning independent of my thinking it. (pauses to look) I look out of the window. A garden. Trees. Grass. A young woman in a chair reading a book. I think: chair. So she is sitting. I think: book. So she is reading. Now the young woman touches her hair where it's come undone. But how can we be sure there is a world of phenomena, a woman reading in a garden? Perhaps the only thing that's real is my sensory experience, which has the form of a woman reading- in a universe which is in fact empty! But Immanuel Kant says- no! Because what I perceive as reality includes concepts which I cannot experience through the senses. Time and space. Cause and effect. Relations between things. Without me there is something wrong with this picture. The trees, the grass, the woman are merely- oh, she's coming! (nervously)- she's coming in here-! I say, don't leave!-where are you going? — Tom Stoppard

All the thoughts/images in our minds, and all the emotions connected with our thoughts will sooner or later manifest as our reality. — Maddy Malhotra

Neurotic suffering indicates inner conflict. Each side of the conflict is likely to be a composite of many partial forces, each one of which has been structured into behavior, attitude, perception, value. Each component asserts itself, claims priority, insists that something else yield, accommodates. The conflict therefore is fixed, stubborn, enduring. It may be impugned and dismissed without effect, imprecations and remorse are of no avail, strenuous acts of will may be futile; it causes - yet survives and continues to cause - the most intense suffering, humiliation, rending of flesh.
Such a conflict is not to be uprooted or excised. It is not an ailment, it is the patient himself. The suffering will not disappear without a change in the conflict, and a change in the conflict amounts to a change in what one is and how one lives, feels, reacts. — Allen Wheelis

Personal growth will cause a ripple effect as the growth in consciousness of enough people, one by one, can create general change, and lasting social improvements. — Bud Harris

Karma, simply put, is an action for an action ... good or bad. — Stephen Richards

In between effect and cause and just beyond the range of normal sight, this glittering joker was dancing in the dragon's jaws. — Bruce Cockburn

Sometimes one has the feeling of an almost supernatural character to the shifts and changes in our national mood. They appear beyond the prose of cause and effect ... — Elizabeth Hardwick

the economic pain gripping the United States will not actually be the fault of immigrants - or China, Muslims, environmentalists, or even terrorists. Nor is the essential problem Big Government: As we have seen, the desperate effort to inflate government spending and power is more of an effect than a cause of the nation's predicament. — Richard Heinberg

Religion is trust, and that trust arose in the beginning from the impressions made on the mind and heart of man by the order and wisdom of nature, and more particularly, by those regularly recurring events, the return of the sun, the revival of the moon, the order of the seasons, the law of cause and effect, gradually discovered in all things, and traced back in the end to a cause of all causes, by whatever name we choose to call it. — Friedrich Max Muller

Stock was a rationalist and an atheist. Most of the time she saw the world as a big machine where things just played themselves out. Anonymous forces, impersonal powers, action and reaction, cause and effect. It would be comforting to live in a world that had order and purpose in it, which she supposed was why so many people pretended they did. — M.R. Carey

Under presupposition of free will each human action would be an inexplicable miracle - an effect without cause. And if one dares the attempt to make such a liberum arbitrium indifferentiae imaginable to oneself, one will soon become aware that here the understanding quite genuinely comes to a standstill: it has no form for thinking of such a thing. — Arthur Schopenhauer

Nothing can be produced without a cause, and the effect is but the cause reproduced. — Swami Vivekananda