Marilyn Ferguson Quotes

We need to have an understanding of what causes what to happen in the world, and why.

The world is interconnected and causations run in many directions at once.

Understand: any phenomenon in the world is by nature complex. The people you deal with are equally complex. Any action sets off a limitless chain of reactions. It is never so simple as A leads to B. B will lead to C, D and beyond.

There are threads in our lives. You pull one, and everything else gets affected.

Things explain each other, not themselves.

We are too much accustomed to attribute to a single cause that which is the product of several, and the majority of our controversies come from that.

By what criterion... can we distinguish among the numberless effects, that are also causes, and among the causes that may, for aught we can know, be also effects, - how can we distinguish which are the means and which are the ends?

Yet we act as if simple cause and effect is at work. We push to find the one simple reason things have gone wrong. We look for the one action, or the one person, that created this mess. As soon as we find someone to blame, we act as if we've solved the problem.

Cause and effect are two sides of one fact.

In any relationship, there's multiple moving pieces. Not just one.

There is a fundamental error in separating the parts from the whole, the mistake of atomizing what should not be atomized. Unity and complementarity constitute reality.

As far as I'm concerned, there is only one study and that is the way in which things relate to one another.

All things are delicately interconnected.

Nothing, she now knew, could be defined in exclusion, and every bug, pencil, and grass blade was a dictionary in itself, requiring the definitions of all things to fulfill its own.

In nature nothing exists alone.

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.

All sciences are connected; they lend each other material aid as parts of one great whole, each doing its own work, not for itself alone, but for the other parts; as the eye guides the body and the foot sustains it and leads it from place to place.

Never give children a chance of imagining that anything exists in isolation. Make it plain from the very beginning that all living is relationship. Show them relationships in the woods, in the fields, in the ponds and streams, in the village and in the country around it. Rub it in.

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

The parts of the universe ... all are connected with each other in such a way that I think it to be impossible to understand any one without the whole.

Families are like puzzles. They fit together in a certain way, and if one piece is missing, it throws everything off.

It always takes two. For relationships to work, for them to break apart, for them to be fixed.

The causes we know everything about depend on causes we know very little about, which depend on causes we know absolutely nothing about.