Quotations about:
    cause and effect


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Consequences are unpitying.

George Eliot (1819-1880) English novelist [pseud. of Mary Ann Evans]
Adam Bede, Book 1, ch. 16 “Links” [Mr. Irwine] (1859)
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Added on 19-May-23 | Last updated 19-May-23
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Oh, if at every moment of our lives we could know the consequences of some of the utterings, thoughts and deeds that seem so trivial and unimportant at the time! And should we not conclude from such examples that there is no such thing in life as unimportant moments devoid of meaning for the future?

Isabelle Eberhardt
Isabelle Eberhardt (1877-1904) Swiss-Russian explorer and author [Si Mahmoud Saadi]
The Passionate Nomad: The Diary of Isabelle Eberhardt , “26 November 1901” (1987)[tr. de Voogd]
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Added on 12-May-23 | Last updated 12-May-23
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If you made a list of reasons why any couple got married, and another list of reasons for their divorce, you’d have a hell of a lot of overlapping.

Mignon McLaughlin (1913-1983) American journalist and author
The Neurotic’s Notebook, ch. 1 (1963)
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Added on 4-May-23 | Last updated 4-May-23
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Perhaps the most useful lesson the student of history can learn is to avoid oversimplification, and to accept the notion of multiple causation or to resign himself to the fact that as yet we do not know enough to explain the causes of things. To yearn for a single, and usually simple, explanation of the chaotic materials of the past, to search for a single thread in the most tangled of all skeins, is a sign of immaturity.

Henry Steele Commager (1902-1998) American historian, writer, activist
The Nature and the Study of History, ch. 5 (1965)
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Added on 18-May-22 | Last updated 1-Jun-22
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Acts and their consequences are the things by which our fellows judge us. Anything else, and all that you get is a cheap feeling of moral superiority by thinking how you would have done something nicer if it had been you. So as for the rest, leave it to heaven. I’m not qualified.

Roger Zelazny (1937-1995) American writer
The Hand of Oberon, ch. 13 (1976)
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Added on 16-Feb-22 | Last updated 16-Feb-22
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Historians can sometimes explain, or at any rate discuss the immediate causes of some great event. Beyond that they can do little more than arrive at the platitude that every generation is, to some extent, responsible for what happened afterwards. In this way, we can finally reach the preposterous conclusion that the ancient Romans were responsible for the First World War, when they failed to civilize the Germans. This is sometimes called learning from history.

A. J. P. Taylor (1906-1990) British historian, journalist, broadcaster [Alan John Percivale Taylor]
“What Else Indeed?” New York Review of Books (5 Aug 1965)
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Added on 27-Sep-21 | Last updated 27-Sep-21
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Ignorance of remote causes disposeth men to attribute all events to the causes immediate and instrumental: for these are all the causes they perceive.

Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) English philosopher
Leviathan, Part 1, ch. 11 (1651)
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Added on 6-Nov-20 | Last updated 6-Nov-20
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It was later that the story of Windle Poons really came to an end, if “story” means all that he did and caused and set in motion. In the Ramtop village where they dance the real Morris dance, for example, they believe that no one is finally dead until the ripples they cause in the world die away — until the clock he wound up winds down, until the wine she made has finished its ferment, until the crop they planted is harvested. The span of someone’s life, they say, is only the core of their actual existence.

Terry Pratchett (1948-2015) English author
Reaper Man (1991)
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Added on 29-May-17 | Last updated 5-Jan-24
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There are few mortals so insensible that their affections cannot be gained by mildness; their confidence by sincerity; their hatred by scorn or neglect.

Johann Georg Zimmermann (1728-1795) Swiss philosophical writer, naturalist, physician
Aphorisms and Reflections on Men, Morals and Things (1800)
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Added on 17-Aug-16 | Last updated 17-Aug-16
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A great flame follows a little spark.

[Poca favilla gran fiamma seconda.]

Dante Alighieri the poet
Dante Alighieri (1265-1321) Italian poet
The Divine Comedy, “Paradiso,” Canto 1, l. 34 (1321)
 
Added on 1-Jun-16 | Last updated 1-Jun-16
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You never can tell when you do an act
Just what the result will be;
But with every deed you are sowing a seed,
Though the harvest you may not see.

Ella Wheeler Wilcox (1850-1919) American author and poet.
“You Never Can Tell,” Custer And Other Poems (1896)
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Added on 21-Sep-15 | Last updated 21-Sep-15
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Nature is but a name for an effect,
Whose cause is God.

William Cowper (1731-1800) English poet
The Task, 6.123 (1785)
 
Added on 11-Sep-15 | Last updated 11-Sep-15
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For want of a naile the shoe is lost, for want of a shoe the horse is lost, for want of a horse the rider is lost.

George Herbert (1593-1633) Welsh priest, orator, poet.
Jacula Prudentum, or Outlandish Proverbs, Sentences, &c. (compiler), # 499 (1640 ed.)
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Added on 9-Sep-10 | Last updated 26-Jan-24
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A hen is only an egg’s way of making another egg.

Samuel Butler (1835-1902) English novelist, satirist, scholar
Life and Habit, ch. 8 (1877)

Full text.

 
Added on 10-Apr-09 | Last updated 5-Sep-19
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Life is a perpetual instruction in cause and effect.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) American essayist, lecturer, poet
“Natural Religion” (1861-02-03)
 
Added on 1-Feb-04 | Last updated 27-Mar-23
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The Laws of Nature are just, but terrible. There is no weak mercy in them. Cause and consequence are inseparable and inevitable. The elements have no forbearance. The fire burns, the water drowns, the air consumes, the earth buries. And perhaps it would be well for our race if the punishment of crimes against the Laws of Man were as inevitable as the punishment of crimes against the Laws of Nature — were Man as unerring in his judgments as Nature.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882) American poet
“Table-Talk,” Driftwood (1857)
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Added on 1-Feb-04 | Last updated 2-Dec-22
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