Quotes About Causality

As a realist, I can argue that there is no fire without smoke and not the other way around.

Entities do not exist In their causes, in their conditions In aggregations of many things, or in individual things Therefore, all entities are empty.

Our actions are not simply links in a closed chain of causally connected physical events. We have the capacity to be first causes, starting a new chain of cause and effect.

When you know that consciousness is the one and only reality–conceiving itself to be something good, bad, or indifferent, and becoming that which it conceived itself to be –you are free from the tyranny of second causes, free from the belief that there are causes outside of your own mind that can affect your life.

psychologist David Premack refers to as the "Russian-novel problem"—that is, when looking at the history of two animals (or humans), it is often hard to know what caused what, since the two may have interacted in so many ways over such a long time, and they may also remember events differently and act according to this subjective experience.

Occam's razor, the philosophical basis of all science: assume the simplest natural cause. That answer might turn out not to be correct, but we should not resort to more complex reasoning unless it is shown to be necessary.

Nobody is ignorant of the fact that historical events are made up of four factors: necessity, coincidence, spontaneity, freedom. Nevertheless, it is rare to find a historiographical school that does not seek to reduce them to a single factor.

in accordance with the primitive arrangement of things, the most trifling causes produce the greatest events, and the grandest undertakings end in the most insignificant results.

Just because two things happen in sequence, doesn't mean there's a casual relationship

We come to understand the law of casuality - that is, we see that all beings are experiencing what they're experiencing based on their own actions and not by what we wish for them - and therefore we relax in a deep understanding and acceptance of the way things are.

Just as there is no loss of basic energy in the universe, so no thought or action is without its effects, present or ultimate, seen or unseen, felt or unfelt.

Two plus two always equals four. Balls dropped off roofs always fall. Your every thought always affects physical reality.

Causality was no longer the hidden demiurge that ruled the universe: down was up, the last was the first, the end was the beginning. Heraclitus had been resurrected from his dung heap, and what he had to show us was the simplest of truths: reality was a yo-yo, change was the only constant.

You can't keep the second Great Commandment unless you are first keeping the first. Only in bowing before God and submitting to his desires can we really turn to one another in peace and love. Any agenda for change that forgets this vertical causality will prove temporary and cosmetic.

Time travel is pure bullshit, impossible; nobody can defeat causality or entropy.

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.