David Hume Quotes

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Of causes, some are complete and primary, others auxiliary and proximate. Hence, when we say that all things come about through fate by antecedent causes, we do not mean this to be understood as 'by complete and primary causes,' but 'by auxiliary and proximate causes.'

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?

Is action merely the incidental product of thought, or is thought the consequential product of action?

Mind is the cause; everything else is effect.

The mental never influences the physical. It is always the physical that modifies the mental, and when we think that the mind is diseased, it is always an illusion.

Everything, both mental and physical, is rigidly bound by the law of causation.

If naturalism were true then all thoughts whatever would be wholly the result of irrational causes. It cuts its own throat.

We live in a world of cause and effect.

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.

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.

Everything is the way it is because everything was the way it was

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.

All things happen by virtue of necessity.