Tom Stoppard Quotes

It is impossible, in principle, to explain any pattern by invoking a single quantity.

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?

The complexities of cause and effect defy analysis.

The deduction of effect from cause is often blocked by some insuperable extrinsic obstacle: the true causes may be quite unknown. Nowhere in life is this so common as in war, where the facts are seldom fully known and the underlying motives even less so.

You never know why something works or doesn't.

Chance doesn't mean meaningless randomness, but historical contingency. This happens rather than that, and that's the way that novelty, new things, come about.

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.

I think it's an interesting thing to me, because we have this desire for everything to be explained to us. But if you go through your daily actions, very little ends up having a written-down explanation for why things happen, or why people do specific things.

You cannot do only one thing.

In human affairs the solution to every problem contains within it the seeds of a new problem.

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

The larger the event, the less likelihood of having a single cause or origin.

To our critical eyes, the threads of which the past is woven are, by nature, endless and indivisible. Scientifically speaking, we cannot grasp the absolute beginning of anything: everything extends backwards to be prolonged by something else.

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

Most of the time-- 99 percent of the time-- you just don't know how and why the threads are looped together, and that's okay. Do a good thing and something bad happens. Do a bad thing and something good happens. Do nothing and everything explodes.

Life is chaotic and unpredictable. If a butterfly flaps its wings in one part of the world, it could cause people at the opposite end of the globe to watch a Discovery Channel special on butterflies

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

The truth is that everything causes everything else. We do not speak therefore of one thing causing another. There are no secrets. It's just we thought they said dead when they said bread.

General Systems Theory, a related modern concept [to holism], says that each variable in any system interacts with the other variables so thoroughly that cause and effect cannot be separated. A simple variable can be both cause and effect. Reality will not be still. And it cannot be taken apart! You cannot understand a cell, a rat, a brain structure, a family, a culture if you isolate it from its context. Relationship is everything.

This world cannot explain its own difficulties without the assistance of another.

We have usually no knowledge that any one factor will exert its effects independently of all others that can be varied, or that its effects are particularly simply related to variations in these other factors.

In the world we live in, what we know and what we don't know are like Siamese twins, inseparable, existing in a state of confusion.

Miracles are propitious accidents, the natural causes of which are too complicated to be readily understood.

... we are the products of our past. ... a web of complexities.

There are downsides to everything; there are unintended consequences to everything.