Quotes About Cause

There is a method to the madness. What they have in common is the search for cause.

Sometimes, of course, the war required that he be cruel, but what cause worth fighting for did not require cruelty of its champions once in a while?

Experience was made up of endless ambiguities—of motive, of feeling, of cause and effect—and if he was to win under such circumstances, he had to understand how those ambiguities worked.

funk. The official cause of death, given by

The fear is mother of the event.

For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side-effect of one's dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the by-product of one's surrender to a person other than oneself. Happiness must happen, and the same holds for success: you have to let it happen by not caring about it.

If it were avoidable, however, the meaningful thing to do would be to remove its cause, be it psychological, biological or political. To suffer unnecessarily is masochistic rather than heroic.

For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side-effect of one's dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the by-product of one's surrender to a person other than oneself

Don't aim at success—the more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side-effect of one's dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the by-product of one's surrender to a person other than oneself. Happiness must happen, and the same holds for success: you have to let it happen by not caring about it.

If it is avoidable, the meaningful thing to do is to remove its cause, for unnecessary suffering is masochistic rather than heroic.

For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side-effect of one's dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the by-product of one's surrender to a person other than oneself.

Precisely this one, which I had intended to be published anonymously so that it could never build any reputation on the part of the author, did become a success.... Don't aim at success - the more you aim and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued, it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side-effect of one's dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the by-product of one's surrender to a person other than oneself.

For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side-effect of one's dedication to a cause greater than one-self or as a by-product of one's surrender to a person other than oneself.

In this wrought-iron world of criss-cross cause and effect, could it be that the hidden throb I stole from them did not affect their future?

A main cause of employee disengagement is poor leadership

Another cause, and probably more important, was the careless way the city

Have a very good reason for everything you do.

There is no exception to the fact that men have everywhere come to the conclusion that the earth was flat, and yet a wider and truer knowledge proved that universal belief to be quite false. The fact of a certain belief being universal only warrants the assumption that the belief itself has a cause, but it tells us nothing whatever concerning its truthfulness.

S]ome score of members of the High Court of Chancery bar ought to be --- as here they are --- mistily engaged in one of the ten thousand stages of an endless cause, tripping one another up on slippery precedents, groping knee-deep in technicalities, running their goat-hair and horse-hair warded heads against walls of words, and making a pretence of equity with serious faces ....

Whether or not it is true that climate change exacerbates other environmental problems, the rush to name a unitary cause of a complex problem should give us pause. The pattern is familiar. It is none other than war thinking, which also depends on identifying a unitary cause of a complex problem. That cause is called the enemy, and the solution is to defeat the enemy.

reductionistic thinking pervades the entire political spectrum...When no proximate cause is obvious, we tend to feel uncomfortable, often to the extent of finding some reasonable candidate for "the cause" and going to war against that.

Our intellectual habit is to find the One Cause, our scientific programming is to measure it, and our political gearing is to attack it. When the One Cause is global, we cross our fingers and hand over responsibility and power to distant global institutions. They'll take care of it. We hope. But too often, blaming climate change means not doing anything at all.

The future has always been determined. What else could affect human actions, other than each individual's — unique and complex — inheritance and past experience? Who we are decides what we do — and what greater 'freedom' could anyone demand? If 'choice' wasn't grounded absolutely in cause and effect, what would decide its outcome? Meaningless random glitches from quantum noise in the brain.

It should go without saying that any cause is better served by doing something well than by doing it badly... In fact, it is better to do nothing for the cause at all than to do something that reflects badly on it... So the first principle of responsible activism should not be "Do something." Instead, one should take a page from medical ethics and "First, do no harm." (Harm to the cause, that is.)