Causality Quotes

“Shallow men believe in luck or in circumstance. Strong men believe in cause and effect.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Man is so intelligent that he feels impelled to invent theories to account for what happens in the world. Unfortunately, he is not quite intelligent enough, in most cases, to find correct explanations. So that when he acts on his theories, he behaves very often like a lunatic.”
― Aldous Huxley

“All I'm saying is that it's shortsighted to blame TV. It's simply another symptom. TV didn't invent our aesthetic childishness here any more than the Manhattan Project invented aggression.”
― David Foster Wallace

“One should be light like a bird, and not like a feather.”
― Paul Valery

“Belief in the causal nexus is superstition.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

“There are no telegraphs on Tralfamadore. But you're right: each clump of symbols is a brief, urgent message-- describing a situation, a scene. We Tralfamadorians read them all at once, not one after the other. There isn't any particular relationship between all the messages, except that the author has chosen them carefully, so that, when seen all at once, they produce an image of life that is beautiful and surprising and deep. There is no beginning, no middle, no end, no suspense, no moral, no causes, no effects. What we love in our books are the depths of many marvelous moments seen all at one time.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

“The law of causality, I believe, like much that passes muster among philosophers, is a relic of a bygone age, surviving, like the monarchy, only because it is erroneously supposed to do no harm.”
― Bertrand Russell, Selected Papers

“I’m fighting a losing battle. I can’t tell this story the way it should be told. This whole hotchpotch of characters, events, dates, and the infinite branching of cause and effect - and these people, these real people who actually existed. I’m barely able to mention a tiny fragment of their lives, their actions, their thoughts. I keep banging my head against the wall of history. And I look up and see, growing all over it - ever higher and denser, like a creeping ivy - the unmappable pattern of causality ... How many forgotten heroes sleep in history's great cemetery?”
― Laurent Binet, HHhH

“Conspiracy theory, like causality, works fantastically well as an explanatory model but only if you use it backwards. The fact that we cannot predict much about tomorrow strongly indicates that most of the explanations we develop about how something happened yesterday have (like history in general) a high bullshit content.”
― Peter J. Carroll, Psybermagick: Advanced Ideas in Chaos Magic

“Because reasoning about causes and effects is a very difficult thing, and I believe the only judge of that can be God. We are already hard put to establish a relationship between such an obvious effect as a charred tree and the lightning bolt that set fire to it, so to trace sometimes endless chains of causes and effects seems to me as foolish as trying to build a tower that will touch the sky.”
― Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose

“Every action is a reaction.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“English: "Means are limit of consequences."

Česky: „Prostředky jsou limitem následků.”
― Sebastián Wortys, Vtiposcifilo-z/s-ofie

“A tragedy unveiled in its causality is but a tragedy incomplete; only in the shadow of uncertainty, where the root of suffering remains veiled, does the tragedy reach its poignant entirety.”
― Syed Buali Gillani

“The demonic etiology ofcertain illnesses is affirmed by the Scriptures: explicitly in the prologue to the Book ofJob (Job 2:6-7), and implicitly in tbe words of the Apostle Peter, "God anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Spirit and with power; ... he went about doing good and healing all that were oppressed by the devll, for God was with him" (Acts 10:38). In addition, there are numerous biblical accounts of miracles where the demonic origin of illness clearly appears. The Fathers also affirm such an etiology. This recognition of a demonic etiology does not prevent the Fathers from admitting as well a biological, organic or functional etiology as parallel or secondary. Far from excluding physical causality, the "metaphysical" or spiritual origin of illness includes the physical aspect, recognizing it to be a necessary vehicle for manifesting the demonic.”
― Jean-Claude Larchet, The Theology of Illness

“L’algèbre s’applique aux nuages ; l’irradiation de l’astre profite à la rose; aucun penseur n’oserait dire que le parfum de l’aubépine est inutile aux constellations. Qui donc peut calculer le trajet d’une molécule? Que savons-nous si des créations de monde ne sont point déterminées par des chutes de grains de sable? Qui donc connaît les flux et les reflux réciproques de l’infiniment grand et de l’infiniment petit, le retentissement des causes dans les précipices de l’être et les avalanches de la création? […] Tous les oiseaux qui volent ont à la patte le fil de l’infini. […] Dans les vastes échanges cosmiques, la vie universelle va et vient en quantités inconnues, roulant tout dans l’invisible mystère des effluves, […] rattachant le vol d’un insecte au mouvement de la terre, subordonnant, qui sait? ne fût-ce que par l’identité de la loi, l’évolution de la comète dans le firmament au tournoiement de l’infusoire dans la goutte d’eau. Machine faite d’esprit. Engrenage énorme dont le premier moteur est le moucheron et dont la dernière roue est le zodiaque.”
― Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

“Causality = Correlation + Assumptions”
― J.N. Berkemeijer

“We each unwittingly contribute, each and every day, to the preventions and to the causes of millions of accidents.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“Results of a recent survey of 74 chief executive officers indicate that there may be a link between childhood pet ownership and future career success. Fully 94% of the CEOs, all of them employed within Fortune 500 companies, had possessed a dog, a cat, or both, as youngsters.

The respondents asserted that pet ownership had helped them to develop many of the positive character traits that make them good managers today, including responsibility, empathy, respect for other living beings, generosity, and good communication skills. For all we know, more than 94% of children raised in the backgrounds from which chief executives come had pets, in which case the direction of dependency would be negative. Maybe executive success is really related to tooth brushing during childhood. Probably all chief executives brushed their teeth, at least occasionally, and we might imagine the self-discipline thus acquired led to their business success. That seems more reasonable than the speculation that “communication skills” gained through interacting with a childhood pet promote better relationships with other executives and employees.”
― Reid Hastie, Rational Choice in an Uncertain World: The Psychology of Judgement and Decision Making

“Another situation in which we attend to base rates occurs if people ascribe some causal significance to discrepant rates. When they can see the causal relevance of the base rates, they often incorporate them into their reasoning. For example, the belief that one bus company has more accidents than another because its drivers are more poorly selected and trained will influence mock jurors to take this difference in accident rates into account in evaluating eyewitness testimony; but belief that a bus company has more accidents simply because it is larger will not. Study after study has shown that when these rates are merely statistical as opposed to causal, they tend to be ignored. Exactly the same effect seems to occur in real courtrooms; naked statistical evidence is notoriously unpersuasive.”
― Reid Hastie, Rational Choice in an Uncertain World: The Psychology of Judgement and Decision Making

“In the celestial firmament the seed of infinity is sown in just one bubble in a never-ending cosmic ocean of causality. This great expanse gives way to entire universes and worlds within from which life is born, and from its evolved forms new-universes are shaped. New creations to be watched, but what if they are found wanting—who shall judge them—benevolent or malevolent beings, immortals, deities, the Gods?”
― J.L. Haynes

“Each human act has countless causes. The author works to reveal these causes.”
― Wisława Szymborska, How to Start Writing (and When to Stop): Advice for Writers

“It is the plurality of effects that we mistake for that of causes.”
― Raheel Farooq, Why I Am a Muslim: And a Christian and a Jew

“How was confounding defined then, and how should it be defined? Armed with what we now know about the logic of causality, the answer to the second question is easier. The quantity we observe is the conditional probability of the outcome given the treatment, P(Y | X). The question we want to ask of Nature has to do with the causal relationship between X and Y, which is captured by the interventional probability P( Y | do(X)). Confounding, then, should simply be defined as anything that leads to a discrepancy between the two: P(Y | X) != P(Y | do(X)). Why all the fuss.”
― Judea Pearl, The Book of Why: The New Science of Cause and Effect

“No being can be excluded from causal action.”
― Radoslav Rochallyi, ESSE: Theorems on Morality and Power

“Rien n’est petit en effet; quiconque est sujet aux pénétrations profondes de la nature, le sait. Bien qu’aucune satisfaction absolue ne soit donnée à la philosophie, pas plus de circonscrire la cause que de limiter l’effet, le contemplateur tombe dans des extases sans fond à cause de toutes ces décompositions de forces aboutissant à l’unité. Tout travaille à tout.

L’algèbre s’applique aux nuages ; l’irradiation de l’astre profite à la rose ; aucun penseur n’oserait dire que le parfum de l’aubépine est inutile aux constellations. Qui donc peut calculer le trajet d’une molécule? que savons-nous si des créations de mondes ne sont point déterminées par des chutes de grains de sable? qui donc connaît les flux et les reflux réciproques de l’infiniment grand et de l’infiniment petit, le retentissement des causes dans les précipices de l’être, et les avalanches de la création? Un ciron importe ; le petit est grand, le grand est petit ; tout est en équilibre dans la nécessité ; effrayante vision pour l’esprit. Il y a entre les êtres et les choses des relations de prodige ; dans cet inépuisable ensemble, de soleil à puceron, on ne se méprise pas ; on a besoin les uns des autres. La lumière n’emporte pas dans l’azur les parfums terrestres sans savoir ce qu’elle en fait ; la nuit fait des distributions d’essence stellaire aux fleurs endormies. Tous les oiseaux qui volent ont à la patte le fil de l’infini. La germination se complique de l’éclosion d’un météore et du coup de bec de l’hirondelle brisant l’œuf, et elle mène de front la naissance d’un ver de terre et l’avènement de Socrate. Où finit le télescope, le microscope commence. Lequel des deux a la vue la plus grande? Choisissez. Une moisissure est une pléiade de fleurs ; une nébuleuse est une fourmilière d’étoiles. Même promiscuité, et plus inouïe encore, des choses de l’intelligence et des faits de la substance. Les éléments et les principes se mêlent, se combinent, s’épousent, se multiplient les uns par les autres, au point de faire aboutir le monde matériel et le monde moral à la même clarté. Le phénomène est en perpétuel repli sur lui-même. Dans les vastes échanges cosmiques, la vie universelle va et vient en quantités inconnues, roulant tout dans l’invisible mystère des effluves, employant tout, ne perdant pas un rêve de pas un sommeil, semant un animalcule ici, émiettant un astre là, oscillant et serpentant, faisant de la lumière une force et de la pensée un élément, disséminée et indivisible, dissolvant tout, excepté ce point géométrique, le moi ; ramenant tout à l’âme atome ; épanouissant tout en Dieu ; enchevêtrant, depuis la plus haute jusqu’à la plus basse, toutes les activités dans l’obscurité d’un mécanisme vertigineux, rattachant le vol d’un insecte au mouvement de la terre,subordonnant, qui sait? ne fût-ce que par l’identité de la loi, l’évolution de la comète dans le firmament au tournoiement de l’infusoire dans la goutte d’eau. Machine faite d’esprit. En grenage énorme dont le premier moteur est le moucheron et dont la dernière roue est le zodiaque.”
― Victor Hugo

“Our laws are based only on probability, on statistics, not on causality; they apply to the general rule, not the particular case.”
― Friedrich Dürrenmatt, The Pledge

“Causality is to the writer what melody is to the songwriter: a superpower that the audience feels as the crux of the matter; the thing the audience actually shows up for; the hardest thing to do; that which distinguishes the competent practitioner from the extraordinary one.”
― George Saunders, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain

“A classic example demonstrating necessary causation tells the story of a
fire that broke out after someone struck a match, and the question is “What
caused the fire, striking the match or the presence of oxygen in the room?”
Note that both factors are equally necessary, since the fire would not have
occurred absent one of them. So, from a purely logical point of view, the two
factors are equally responsible for the fire. Why, then, do we consider lighting
the match a more reasonable explanation of the fire than the presence of
oxygen?”
― Judea Pearl, The Book of Why: The New Science of Cause and Effect

“إن فكرة الحتمية الفيزيائية التي تسربت للعقل الغربي منذ اكتشف نيوتن قوانين الحركة الميكانيكية ليست مبدأ عالميا يعم جميع ظواهر الطبيعة .. يعرف ذلك علماء ميكانيكا الكم ويعرف ذلك الشخص البسيط الذي يؤمن أن الله يستجيب الدعاء ويعرف أن استيقاظه من النوم كل صباح ليست عملية حتمية من لوازم قوانين الطبيعة ولكنها هبة من الله الذي أراد له أن يحيا يوما آخر!”
― طارق أحمد السيد, معادلة الإيمان

“I don't see the turn of the universe, I cause the universe to turn.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Sonnets From The Mountaintop