Ludwig Wittgenstein Quotes

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

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

I assert that nothing ever comes to pass without a cause.

Everything has a cause.

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.

A CAUSE is an object precedent and contiguous to another, and so united with it that the idea of the one determines the mind to form the idea of the other, and the impression of the one to form a more lively idea of the other.

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.

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.

All is bound by the law of causation

Take away the cause, and the effect ceases.

Nihil est sine ratione. There is nothing without a reason.

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

The metaphysical doctrine of determinism simply asserts that all events in this world are fixed, or unalterable, or predetermined. It does not assert that they are known to anybody, or predictable by scientific means. But it asserts that the future is as little changeable as is the past. Everybody knows what we mean when we say that the past cannot be changed. It is in precisely the same sense that the future cannot be changed, according to metaphysical determinism.

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

I also don't believe that "everything happens for a reason," which is in a similar category of world-views.

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.

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.

Belief in the causal nexus is superstition.

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.

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

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

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.

... causes (pains) are not logical constructions out of their effects (behaviour).