Cause And Effect Quotes

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

“Injustice in the end produces independence.”
― Voltaire

“There is no deception on the part of the woman, where a man bewilders himself: if he deludes his own wits, I can certainly acquit the women. Whatever man allows his mind to dwell upon the imprint his imagination has foolishly taken of women, is fanning the flames within himself -- and, since the woman knows nothing about it, she is not to blame. For if a man incites himself to drown, and will not restrain himself, it is not the water's fault.”
― John Gower, Confessio Amantis, Volume 1

“Choices made, whether bad or good, follow you forever and affect everyone in their path one way or another.”
― J.E.B. Spredemann, An Unforgivable Secret

“At some point, you have to accept the fact that any movement creates waves, and the only other option is to lie still and learn nothing.”
― Becky Chambers, To Be Taught, If Fortunate

“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. The ego takes everything personally, leaving no room for higher guidance or purpose. If you can, realize that a cosmic plan is unfolding and appreciate the incredibly woven tapestry for what it is, a design of unparalleled marvel.”
― Deepak Chopra, The Book of Secrets: Unlocking the Hidden Dimensions of Your Life

“A man is worked upon by what he works on. He may carve out his circumstances, but his circumstances will carve him out as well.”
― Frederick Douglass, The Portable Frederick Douglass

“You are here to make a difference, to either improve the world or worsen it. And whether or not you consciously choose to, you will accomplish one or the other.”
― Richelle E. Goodrich, Making Wishes: Quotes, Thoughts, & a Little Poetry for Every Day of the Year

“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, Lieh-tzu: A Taoist Guide to Practical Living

“Burning bridges behind you is understandable. It's the bridges before us that we burn, not realizing we may need to cross, that brings regret.”
― Anthony Liccione

“Karma has been a pop culture term for ages. But really, what the heck is it?

Karma is not an inviolate engine of cosmic punishment. Rather, it is a neutral sequence of acts, results, and consequences.

Receiving misfortune does not necessarily indicate that one has committed evil. But it is a sufficient indicator of something else.

And that something else can be anything, as long as it is a logical consequence of what has come before.

Consider: if you fall into a well, you are not a bad person who deserves to suffer—you are merely someone who took a wrong step. Or someone who had one drink too many. Or got a head rush due to poor circulation. Or forgot to wear your glasses. Or—

The reasons are plentiful, and all plausible. But the chain of cause and effect goes way, way back into the deepest hoariest recesses of your personal past.

So never rule out retribution. But never expect it.”
― Vera Nazarian, The Perpetual Calendar of Inspiration

“We have a predator that came from the depths of the cosmos and took over the rule of our lives. Human beings are its prisoners. The Predator is our lord and master. It has rendered us docile, helpless. If we want to protest, it suppresses our protest. If we want to act independently, it demands that we don't do so... I have been beating around the bush all this time, insinuating to you that something is holding us prisoner. Indeed we are held prisoner! "This was an energetic fact for the sorcerers of ancient Mexico ... They took us over because we are food for them, and they squeeze us mercilessly because we are their sustenance. just as we rear chickens in chicken coops, the predators rear us in human coops, humaneros. Therefore, their food is always available to them." "No, no, no, no," [Carlos replies] "This is absurd don Juan. What you're saying is something monstrous. It simply can't be true, for sorcerers or for average men, or for anyone." "Why not?" don Juan asked calmly. "Why not? Because it infuriates you? ... You haven't heard all the claims yet. I want to appeal to your analytical mind. Think for a moment, and tell me how you would explain the contradictions between the intelligence of man the engineer and the stupidity of his systems of beliefs, or the stupidity of his contradictory behaviour. Sorcerers believe that the predators have given us our systems of belief, our ideas of good and evil, our social mores. They are the ones who set up our hopes and expectations and dreams of success or failure. They have given us covetousness, greed, and cowardice. It is the predators who make us complacent, routinary, and egomaniacal." "'But how can they do this, don Juan? [Carlos] asked, somehow angered further by what [don Juan] was saying. "'Do they whisper all that in our ears while we are asleep?" "'No, they don't do it that way. That's idiotic!" don Juan said, smiling. "They are infinitely more efficient and organized than that. In order to keep us obedient and meek and weak, the predators engaged themselves in a stupendous manoeuvre stupendous, of course, from the point of view of a fighting strategist. A horrendous manoeuvre from the point of view of those who suffer it. They gave us their mind! Do you hear me? The predators give us their mind, which becomes our mind. The predators' mind is baroque, contradictory, morose, filled with the fear of being discovered any minute now." "I know that even though you have never suffered hunger... you have food anxiety, which is none other than the anxiety of the predator who fears that any moment now its manoeuvre is going to be uncovered and food is going to be denied. Through the mind, which, after all, is their mind, the predators inject into the lives of human beings whatever is convenient for them. And they ensure, in this manner, a degree of security to act as a buffer against their fear." "The sorcerers of ancient Mexico were quite ill at ease with the idea of when [the predator] made its appearance on Earth. They reasoned that man must have been a complete being at one point, with stupendous insights, feats of awareness that are mythological legends nowadays. And then, everything seems to disappear, and we have now a sedated man. What I'm saying is that what we have against us is not a simple predator. It is very smart, and organized. It follows a methodical system to render us useless. Man, the magical being that he is destined to be, is no longer magical. He's an average piece of meat." "There are no more dreams for man but the dreams of an animal who is being raised to become a piece of meat: trite, conventional, imbecilic.”
― Carlos Castaneda, The Active Side of Infinity

“Unable to attribute misfortune to chance, unable to accept their ultimate insignificance within the greater scheme, the people looked for monsters in their midst.”
― Bernard Beckett, Genesis

“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, She

“By becoming interested in the cause, we are less likely to dislike the effect.”
― Dale Carnegie, How to Win Friends & Influence People

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

“TACKLE the ROOT CAUSE not the EFFECT.”
― Haresh Sippy

“When I try to reconstruct the place that I was, at that point in my life, to figure out how I got there, to that punch, to that bed, to that girl—I can't. I can see where some bad decisions led to some other bad decisions, but I can't get all the way there; it's like I imagine a curve, where I'm dropping lower and lower down, and then I'm off the radar screen, invisible, and then, after some time goes by, the line is rising, visible again, and I don't know what happened in between.”
― Kristen Roupenian, You Know You Want This: Cat Person and Other Stories

“To some extent the romantic condemnation of rationality stems from the very effectiveness of rationality in uplifting men from primitive conditions.”
― Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values

“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

“Whilst the world will be whole, and refuses to be disparted, we seek to act partially, to sunder, to appropriate; for example,—to gratify the senses, we sever the pleasure of the senses from the needs of the character. The ingenuity of man has always been dedicated to the solution of one problem,—how to detach the sensual sweet, the sensual strong, the sensual bright, &c., from the moral sweet, the moral deep, the moral fair; that is, again, to contrive to cut clean off this upper surface so thin as to leave it bottomless; to get a one end, without an other end.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“One should not be obstinate even in worldly interaction. If you are obstinate with a ‘collector’, what will he do? He will throw you in a jail. So then what will happen if you are obstinate in front of God? God won’t put you in jail, but his contentment towards you will break away.”
― Dada Bhagwan, Simple & Effective Science for Self Realization

“It is time you take ownership of your feelings and actions. You can be a cause or you can be an effect—ownership or victimhood.”
― Calvin Niles, The Sun Rises in Eastmoor

“The radical is not fooled by shibboleths and facades. He faces issues squarely and does not hide his cowardice behind the convenient cloak of rationalization. The radical refuses to be diverted by superficial problems. He is completely concerned with fundamental causes rather than current manifestations. He concentrates his attack on the heart of the issue.”
― Saul D. Alinsky, Reveille for Radicals

“The kind of static and segmental thinking which regards problems and issues as separate and apart unto themselves logically trips itself into the pitfall of a second fundamental fallacy. It is inevitable that this type of mental isolation, which fails to observe the relationships between problems, would and does lack a pragmatic understanding of the functional relationship between a local community and the larger social scene. It reveals a complete lack of recognition of the obvious fact that the life of each neighborhood is to a major extent shaped by forces which far transcend the local scene.

It requires nothing more than plain common sense to realize that many of the problems in a local community which seemingly have their roots in the neighborhood in reality stem from sources far removed from the community. To a considerable extent these problems are the result of vast destructive forces which pervade the entire social scene. It is when these forces impinge upon the local community that they give rise to a definite community problem. It should, thus, always be remembered that many apparently local problems are in reality malignant microcosms of vast conflicts, pressures, stresses and strains of the entire social order.”
― Saul D. Alinsky, Reveille for Radicals

“There are moments in life when reason fails, when even the greatest genius is worth nothing. All the years studying, learning, training obscure the brutal fact that there are things we cannot know. A woman could pace out the distance between Dombâng and Rassambur, but the world is filled with spaces we can never measure, effects forever severed from their causes, furious motion for which the prime mover has been lost. It was possible Ananshael sent the spider, possible he did not. In the face of a god who resists all interrogation, the only way forward is faith.”
― Brian Staveley, Skullsworn

“Neglect is the silent parent of every tragedy.”
― pierre lagrenat

“Compassion is reciprocal. As you develop your own mental and emotional stability and extend that stability through a compassionate understanding of others and dealing with them in a kind, empathetic way, your own intentions or aspirations will be fulfilled more quickly and easily. Why? Because if you treat others compassionately—with the understanding that they have the same desire for happiness and the same desire to avoid unhappiness that you do—then the people around you feel a sense of attraction, a sense of wanting to help you as much as you help them.

…In a sense, compassion practice demonstrates the truth of interdependence in action. The more openhearted you become toward others, the more openhearted they become toward you.”
― Mingyur Rinpoche, The Joy of Living: Unlocking the Secret and Science of Happiness

“From a Buddhist perspective, the description of reality provided by quantum mechanics offers a degree of freedom to which most people are not accustomed, and that may at first seem strange and even a little frightening. As much as Westerners in particular value the capacity for freedom, the notion that the act of observation of an event can influence the outcome in random, unpredictable ways can seem like too much responsibility. It’s much easier to assume the role of the victim and assign the responsibility or blame for our experience to some person or power outside oneself. If we’re to take the discoveries of modern science seriously, however, we have to assume responsibility for our moment-by-moment experience.

(...) one of the most basic of the Buddha’s teachings: Everything you think, everything you say, and everything you do is reflected back to you as your own experience. If you cause someone pain, you experience pain ten times worse. If you promote others’ happiness and well-being, you experience the same happiness ten times over. If your own mind is calm, then the people around you will experience a similar degree of calmness.

Even Heisenberg’s famous uncertainty principle acknowledges an intimate connection between inner experience and physical manifestation.”
― Mingyur Rinpoche

“When you are genuinely happy for others, you are paving a way for your own happiness.”
― Michael Bassey Johnson, Sips And Little Portions