Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes

every act of one's life is the unavoidable result of every act that has preceded it.

In the fabric of human events, one thing leads to another. Every mistake is in a sense the product of all the mistakes that have gone before it, from which fact it derives a sort of cosmic forgiveness; and at the same time every mistake is in a sense the determinant of all the mistakes of the future, from which it derives a sort of cosmic unforgivableness.

Cause and effect are two sides of one fact.

I do not believe such a quality as chance exists. Every incident that happens must be a link in a chain.

Anything that happens, happens. Anything that, in happening, causes something else to happen, causes something else to happen. Anything that, in happening, causes itself to happen again, happens again. It doesn’t necessarily do it in chronological order, though.

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.

Fate is the endless chain of causation, whereby things are; the reason or formula by which the world goes on.

You cannot do only one thing.

Everything is a reaction.

I think everything is pretty well preordained - even your mistakes.

The cause ceasing, the effect ceases also.

The present contains nothing more than the past, and what is found in the effect is already in the cause.

Nothing in life is without cause and effect. Nothing is merely a shell. Everything has some motive.

There is no luck in life, everything happens for a reason. Every little thing that you do... leads up to a bigger thing. And that's the story of my life.

Everything...affects everything

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

There are no accidents in my philosophy. Every effect must have its cause. The past is the cause of the present, and the present will be the cause of the future. All these are links in the endless chain stretching from the finite to the infinite.

Everything is the way it is because everything was the way it was

Everything is the way it is because everything was the way it was. Sometimes I feel ensnared in this, as if no matter what I do, what will come has already been fixed.

There is no accident, just as there is no beginning and no end.

Nothing ever happens by chance; everything is pushed from behind.

Whatever is, is in its causes just.

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.

What is the cause, though, of the growth of an acorn? The oak that is to come! What is to happen in the future is then the cause of what is occurring now; and, at the same time, what occurred in the past is also the cause of what is happening now. In addition, a great number of things round about, on every side, are causing what is happening now. Everything, all the time, is causing everything else

Keep reminding yourself of the way things are connected, of great relatedness. All things are implicated in one another and in sympathy with each other. This event is the consequence of some other one. Things push and pull on each other, and breathe together, and are ONE.