David Hume Quotes

If two or more instances of the phenomenon under investigation have only one circumstance in common, the circumstance in which alone all the instances agree is the cause (or effect) of the given phenomenon.

Of causes, some are complete and primary, others auxiliary and proximate. Hence, when we say that all things come about through fate by antecedent causes, we do not mean this to be understood as 'by complete and primary causes,' but 'by auxiliary and proximate causes.'

If you prove the cause, you at once prove the effect; and conversely nothing can exist without its cause.

Everything has a cause.

Take away the cause, and the effect ceases.

Nothing can be produced without a cause, and the effect is but the cause reproduced.

Upon the whole, necessity is something, that exists in the mind, not in objects; nor is it possible for us ever to form the most distant idea of it, consider'd as a quality in bodies. Either we have no idea of necessity, or necessity is nothing but that determination of thought to pass from cause to effects and effects to causes, according to their experienc'd union.

We live in a world of cause and effect.

Events do not really have beginnings or ends. Behind every event is the previous one, causing, or helping to cause, what follows.

This is what writers mean when they say that the notion of cause involves the idea of necessity. If there be any meaning which confessedly belongs to the term necessity, it is unconditionalness. That which is necessary, that which must be, means that which will be, whatever supposition we may make in regard to all other things.

Every event in this world is the effect of some precedent cause, and also the cause of some subsequent effect.

It is clear that the causal nexus is not a nexus at all.

There cannot be a cause without an effect, the present must have had its cause in the past and will have its effect in the future.

In the order of literature, as in others, there is no act that is not the coronation of an infinite series of causes and the source of an infinite series of effects.

Political history is not a sequence of incoherent and haphazard events but a chain of causes and effects.

Is action merely the incidental product of thought, or is thought the consequential product of action?

What is meant by cause? Cause is the fine state of the manifested state.

It is a law, that every event depends on some law.

Every event has had its cause, and nothing, not the least wind that blows, is accident or causeless.

Everything, both mental and physical, is rigidly bound by the law of causation.

In our current understanding of science, we can't find the physical gap in which to slip free will - the uncaused causer - because there seems to be no part of the machinery that does not follow in a causal relationship from the other parts.

We learn the influence of our will from experience alone. And experience only teaches us, how one event constantly follows another; without instructing us in the secret connexion, which binds them together, and renders them inseparable.

Either in or out of time, the decision of a personal agency to commit an action happens antecedent to the action itself. Even if the deciding and the acting happened simultaneously, it would still not be true that the acting was antecedent to the deciding. Imagine God saying, "Oh, look! I just created a universe. Now I'd better decide to do it.

If there is anything in the world which I do firmly believe in, it is the universal validity of the law of causation.

He who picks up one end of a stick picks up the other. He who chooses the beginning of a road chooses the place it leads to. It is the means that determine the end.