Adam Clarke Quotes

There is no such thing as chance or accident; the words merely signify our ignorance of some real and immediate cause.

Do yourself a favor. Don't ever say to me, 'Everything happens for a reason.'

Is anything accidental?

Most people of action are inclined to fatalism and most of thought believe in providence.

Free will is to mind, what chance is to matter

I disagree with the idea that everything happens for a reason.

Either our wills are determined by prior causes and we are not responsible for them, or they are the product of chance and we are not responsible for them.

Let us guard against saying that there are laws in nature. There are merely necessities: there is no one who commands, no one whoobeys, no one who transgresses. Once you understand that there are no purposes, then you also understand that nothing is accidental: for it is only in a world of purposes that the word "accident" makes sense.

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

Free will is the sensation of making a choice. The sensation is real, but the choice seems illusory. Laws of physics determine the future.

Why are things as they are and not otherwise?

Free will is to mind what chance is to matter.

There are two conflicting philosophies that I love: "Everything happens for a reason," as well as "you can change everything that you have control over."

History abhors determinism but cannot tolerate chance.

Tho' there be no such Thing as Chance in the World; our Ignorance of the real Ccause of any Event has the same Influence on the Understanding, and begets a like Species of Belief or Opinion.

Now, you receive all your ideas; therefore you receive your wish, you wish therefore necessarily. The word "liberty" does not therefore belong in any way to your will....The will, therefore, is not a faculty that one can call free. A free will is an expression absolutely void of sense, and what the scholastics have called will of indifference, that is to say willing without cause, is a chimera unworthy of being combated.

Gravity works in your life, the notion of free will works in your life, however problematic it may at times be.

I don't believe in coincidences.

Nothing happens by chance, my friend... No such thing as luck.

Thus every action must be due to one or other of seven causes: chance, nature, compulsion, habit, reasoning, anger, or appetite.

Skepticism is unbelief in cause and effect.

The apprehension of necessity is an imitation of creation.

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

In a universe governed by God there are no chance events. Indeed, there is no such thing as chance. Chance does not exist. It is merely a word we use to describe mathematical possibilities. But chance itself has no power because it has no being. Chance is not an entity that can influence reality. Chance is not a thing. It is nothing.

Old-fashioned determinism was what we may call hard determinism. It did not shrink from such words as fatality, bondage of the will, necessitation, and the like. Nowadays, we have a soft determinism which abhors harsh words, and, repudiating fatality, necessity, and even predetermination, says that its real name is freedom; for freedom is only necessity understood, and bondage to the highest is identical with true freedom.