Tom Stoppard Quotes

EFFECT, n. The second of two phenomena which always occur together in the same order. The first, called a Cause, is said to generate the other-which is no more sensible than it would be for one who has never seen a dog except in pursuit of a rabbit to declare the rabbit the cause of the dog.

The first word gives origin to the second, the first and second to the third, and the third to the fourth, and so on. You cannot begin with the second word.

What happened yesterday affects today; what happens today will affect tomorrow/

I do not believe anything comes by chance. I regard the present as the necessary child of a necessary past.

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.

Everything is a reaction.

I believe that everything we think and feel and do produces a result and that we have to deal with that result - that result is then something that produces another result, so on and so forth, so yes, I do believe in causality.

You have a row of dominoes set up; you knock over the first one, and what will happen to the last one is that it will go over very quickly.

What happens today can affect what happens tomorrow, but it cannot affect what happened yesterday.

Cause and effect are two sides of one fact.

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

Everything has a cause.

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

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.

Your world is one of cause and effect.

In the beginning was the thing. And one thing led to another.

Things just always seem to lead to the logical next step.

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

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.

We're not the cause, we're the effect.

Every one knows that the heavenly bodies move in certain paths in relation to each other with seeming consistency and regularity which we call [physical] law. ... No one attributes freewill or motive to the material world. Is the conduct of man or the other animals any more subject to whim or choice than the action of the planets? ... We know that man's every act is induced by motives that led or urged him here or there; that the sequence of cause and effect runs through the whole universe, and is nowhere more compelling than with man.

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

To talk of luck and chance only shows how little we really know of the laws which govern cause and effect.

Nothing comes into being without a cause and when all the conditions are created, there is nothing that can prevent the consequence.

We live in a world of cause and effect.