Causation Quotes

• Correlation doesn’t imply causation, but it does waggle its eyebrows suggestively and gesture furtively while mouthing ‘look over there.’

  Randall Munroe

  Science, Eyebrows, Doe

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• I have never been in a bad mood and near a beach ball at the same time. Causation? Correlation? Or fate?

  Demetri Martin

  Beach, Fate, Balls

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

  Thomas Huxley

  Believe, Science, Law

  Thomas Henry Huxley (2011). “Collected Essays”, p.121, Cambridge University Press

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• Everything that we know is within our universe, and everything within our universe is moulded by the conditions of space, time, and causation.

  Swami Vivekananda

  Space, Causes, Effects

  Swami Vivekananda (2015). “Karma Yoga: The Yoga of Action”, p.55, Advaita Ashrama

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

  Swami Vivekananda

  Law, Causes, Effects

  Swami Vivekananda (2015). “The Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda”, p.3609, Manonmani Publishers

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• Keats mourned that the rainbow, which as a boy had been for him a magic thing, had lost its glory because the physicists had found it resulted merely from the refraction of the sunlight by the raindrops. Yet knowledge of its causation could not spoil the rainbow for me. I am sure that it is not given to man to be omniscient. There will always be something left to know, something to excite the imagination of the poet and those attuned to the great world in which they live (p. 64)

  Robert Frost

  Boys, Men, Imagination

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• Materialists and madmen never have doubts.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Doubt, Madmen

  Gilbert K. Chesterton (2013). “The Essential Gilbert K. Chesterton”, p.16, Simon and Schuster

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• The fundamental activity of medical science is to determine the ultimate causation of disease.

  Wilfred Trotter

  Fundamentals, Medical Science, Disease

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  Shallow men believe in luck. Strong men believe in cause and effect.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Inspirational, Strength, Being Strong

  Conduct of Life Worship (pp. 191-2)

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• Fate is the endless chain of causation, whereby things are; the reason or formula by which the world goes on.

  Zeno of Citium

  Fate, Goes On, World

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• 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.

  Anselm of Canterbury

  Causes, Problem, Made

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• The great unity which true science seeks is found only by beginning with our knowledge of God, and coming down from Him along the stream of causation to every fact and event that affects us.

  Ernest Howard Crosby

  Unity, Events, Knowledge Of God

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• Agricultural practice served Darwin as the material basis for the elaboration of his theory of Evolution, which explained the natural causation of the adaptation we see in the structure of the organic world. That was a great advance in the knowledge of living nature.

  Trofim Lysenko

  Practice, Theory Of Evolution, Agriculture

  Trofim Denisovich Lysenko (1948). “Soviet Biology: Report to the Lenin Academy of Agricultural Sciences”

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• From the mid-1970s, I also started work on the causation and prevention of famines.

  Amartya Sen

  Prevention, Famine

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• The very hope of experimental philosophy, its expectation of constructing the sciences into a true philosophy of nature, is basedon induction, or, if you please, the a priori presumption, that physical causation is universal; that the constitution of nature is written in its actual manifestations, and needs only to be deciphered by experimental and inductive research; that it is not a latent invisible writing, to be brought out by the magic of mental anticipation or metaphysical mediation.

  Chauncey Wright

  Philosophy, Writing, Science

  Chauncey Wright (1871). “Darwinism: Being an Examination of Mr. St. George Mivart's 'Genesis of Species'”, p.8

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• [G]enes make enzymes, and enzymes control the rates of chemical processes. Genes do not make "novelty seeking" or any other complex and overt behavior. Predisposition via a long chain of complex chemical reactions, mediated through a more complex series of life's circumstances, does not equal identification or even causation.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Long, Doe, Enzymes

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• Science was tearing through the 'fine-spun ecclesiastical cobwebs' to behold a new cosmos, in which our Earth is merely an 'eccentric speck' - a world of evolution 'and unchanging causation'. It invited new ways of thinking. It demanded a new rationale for belief. With science's truths the only accessible ones, 'blind faith' was no longer admirable but 'the one unpardonable sin'.

  Adrian Desmond

  Thinking, Cosmos, World

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• Internal and external nature, mind and matter, are in time and space, and are bound by the law of causation.

  Swami Vivekananda

  Law, Space, Mind

  Swami Vivekananda (2015). “The Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda”, p.2581, Manonmani Publishers

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• Ever since men became capable of free speculation, their actions, in innumerable important respects, have depended upon their theories as to the world and human life, as to what is good and what is evil. This is true in the present day as at any former time. To understand an age or a nation, we must understand its philosophy, and to understand its philosophy we must ourselves be in some degree philosophers. There is here a reciprocal causation: the circumstances of men s lives do much to determine their philosophy, but, conversely, their philosophy does much to determine their circumstances.

  Bertrand Russell

  Philosophy, Men, Evil

  "History of Western Philosophy".

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• Big data is great when you want to verify and quantify small data - as big data is all about seeking a correlation - small data about seeking the causation.

  Martin Lindstrom

  Data, Want, Bigs

  Source: bobmorris.biz

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• This is the work of Nâma-Rupa - name and form. Everything that has form, everything that calls up an idea in your mind, is within Maya; for everything that is bound by the laws of time, space, and causation is within Maya.

  Swami Vivekananda

  Law, Names, Ideas

  Swami Vivekananda (2015). “The Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda”, p.570, Manonmani Publishers

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• Don't confuse correlation and causation. Almost all great records eventually dwindle.

  Charlie Munger

  Records, Correlation

  Charlie Munger's comments on the decline of family-controlled businesses when family foundations take over at the 2001 Wesco Financial Annual Meeting, www.tilsonfunds.com. May 2, 2001.

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• This is absolutely correct and forms part of the larger concept that top-down causation is a key factor not just in the way the brain works but in broader contexts in biology and even physics.

  George F. R. Ellis

  Top Down, Keys, Brain

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• In spite of all evidence that life is discontinuous, a valley of rifts, and that random chance plays a great part in our fates, we go on believing in the continuity of things, in causation and meaning. But we live on a broken mirror, and fresh cracks appear in its surface every day.

  Salman Rushdie

  Believe, Fate, Play

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• The parallelism, or denial of any causation between mind and body, derives basically, and fallaciously, from a theory of substances as having complete concepts that include everything that is true of them.

  Gonzalo Rodriguez-Pereyra

  Mind, Substance, Denial

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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