Daniel Dennett Quotes

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

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.

I think everything is pretty well preordained - even your mistakes.

One of the many lessons that one learns in prison is, that things are what they are and will be what they will be.

The present contains nothing more than the past, and what is found in the effect is already in the cause.

If the world is turning, even the church can’t stop it; if it isn’t turning, nobody can go out and make it turn.

Necessity is the most powerful divinity the world knows--it is the result of physical forces set in operation by ethical forces.

Fate is a sempiternal and unchangeable series and chain of things, rolling and unraveling itself through eternal sequences of cause and effect, of which it is composed and compounded.

There's no such thing as accidents.

Everything that happens, happens of necessity.

There are no accidents in my philosophy. Every effect must have its cause. The past is the cause of the present, and the present will be the cause of the future. All these are links in the endless chain stretching from the finite to the infinite.

Destiny is simply the relentless logic of each day we live.

It at once struck me that under these circumstances favourable variations would tend to be preserved, and unfavourable ones to be destroyed.

Something happens, Blue thinks, and then it goes on happening forever. It can never be changed, can never be otherwise.

Nothing ever happens by chance; everything is pushed from behind.

every act of one's life is the unavoidable result of every act that has preceded it.

If an organised body is not in the situation and circumstances best adapted to its sustenance and propagation, then, in conceiving an indefinite variety among the individuals of that species, we must be assured, that, on the one hand, those which depart most from the best adapted constitution, will be most liable to perish, while, on the other hand, those organised bodies, which most approach to the best constitution for the present circumstances, will be best adapted to continue, in preserving themselves and multiplying the individuals of their race.

Whatever is destined not to happen will not happen, try as you may. Whatever is destined to happen will happen, do what you may to prevent it. This is certain. The best course, therefore, is to remain silent.

Chance does nothing that has not been prepared beforehand.

All stories, if continued far enough, end in death.

If they are sufficiently complete to live, they do live, and it is well they should live. If they are not sufficiently complete to live, they die, and it is best they should die.

This preservation of favourable variations and the destruction of injurious variations, I call Natural Selection, or the Survival of the Fittest. Variations neither useful nor injurious would not be affected by natural selection and would be left a fluctuating element.

We may consequently state the fundamental theorem of Natural Selection in the form: The rate of increase in fitness of any organism at any time is equal to its genetic variance in fitness at that time.

Men believe death's elections to be a thing inscrutable yet every act invites the act which follows and to the extent that men put one foot before the other they are accomplices in their own deaths as in all such facts of destiny.