David Hume Quotes

Logic is a poor model of cause and effect.

Therefore, the causes assigned to natural effects of the same kind must be, so far as possible, the same.

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.

Science is the knowledge of Consequences, and dependence of one fact upon another: by which, out of that we can presently do, we know how to do something else when we will, or the like, another time

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

There is no fyre without some smoke.

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

To know truly is to know by causes.

Each move is dictated by the previous one--that is the meaning of order

It is human choices that move events.

We live in a world of cause and effect.

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

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.

All inferences from experience... are effects of custom, not of reasoning.

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.

Everything is cause and effect. If you don't move, nothing will move with you, and nothing will move toward you.

I learned you don't discover the evidence of any cause in its result.

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).

But a problem occurs about nothing. For that from which something is made is a cause of the thing made from it; and, necessarily,every cause contributes some assistance to the effect's existence.

As the cause is, so the effect will be.

Proof that a given condition always precedes or accompanies a phenomenon does not warrant concluding with certainty that a given condition is the immediate cause of that phenomenon. It must still be established that when this condition is removed, the phenomen will no longer appear.

Either in or out of time, the decision of a personal agency to commit an action happens antecedent to the action itself. Even if the deciding and the acting happened simultaneously, it would still not be true that the acting was antecedent to the deciding. Imagine God saying, "Oh, look! I just created a universe. Now I'd better decide to do it.

That little white ball won't move until you hit it, and there's nothing you can do after it has gone.

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