John Stuart Mill Quotes

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

Fact I know; and Law I know; but what is this Necessity, save an empty shadow of my own mind's throwing?

God has created a logical universe of cause and effect. He who repudiates causality actually repudiates reason.

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

Everything has a cause.

Every event has had its cause, and nothing, not the least wind that blows, is accident or causeless.

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.

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

A quality is something capable of being completely embodied. A law never can be embodied in its character as a law except by determining a habit. A quality is how something may or might have been. A law is how an endless future must continue to be.

Chance is a word void of sense; nothing can exist without a cause.

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.

If something were brought about without an antecedent cause, it would be untrue that all things come about through fate. But if it is plausible that all events have an antecedent cause, what ground can be offered for not conceding that all things come about through fate?

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Nothing fortuitous happens in a child's world. There are no accidents. Everything is connected with everything else and everything can be explained by everything else. . . . For a young child everything that happens is a necessity.

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

Two times two will be four even without my will. Is that what you call man's free will?

Fate then is that necessity by which a certain result will surely be brought to pass according to the natural course of events however we may vary the particular circumstances which precede the event.

There is no result in nature without a cause; understand the cause and you will have no need of the experiment.

In the mind there is no absolute or free will; but the mind is determined to wish this or that by a cause, which has also been determined by another cause, and this last by another cause, and so on to infinity.

It is clear that the causal nexus is not a nexus at all.

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