Great Throughts Treasury

"A species does not live within its environment; it interacts with it. Over a period of time a species can interact so violently that the changes it catalyzes can cause it to change dramatically--even to die out. Scientists estimate that 90% of the life forms that have inhabited our planet are now extinct. From the earliest single-cell life form to the human animal, all have interacted with the environment. All have created problems for themselves. All have been agents of evolutionary change. All have experienced evolution through cataclysm." - Richard Smolowe, fully Richard Edward Smolowe

"Thoughts are behavior. The mind is like a muscle which can be improved with practice. Many 'habits' are a result of poor thinking skills. We play thoughts over and over which keep us distracted from effective problem solving. When out-of-control thoughts run around inside our heads they cause anxiety. We then focus on unproductive thoughts and ideas." - Richard Smolowe, fully Richard Edward Smolowe

"Love is nothing but joy accompanied with the idea of an eternal cause, and hatred is nothing but sorrow with the accompanying idea of an external cause..." -

"Love is nothing else but pleasure accompanied by the idea of an external cause: hate is nothing else but pain accompanied by the idea of an external cause." -

"Neither in God nor outside God is there any cause or reason which can negate His existence, and therefore God necessarily exists." -

"Prior events are causes of those following them, and in this manner all things are bound together with one another, and thus nothing happens in the world such that something else is not entirely a consequence of it and attached to it as a cause... From everything that happens something else follows depending on it by necessity as cause." - Stoics, The Stoics or Stoicism NULL

"The end is the source of everything that exists in the cause and the end of everything that exists in the effect... end, cause and effect, exist in the greatest and least things... To think from ends is the method of wisdom, from causes that of intelligence, and from effects that of knowledge. From this it may be seen that all perfection increases in and according to the ascent to higher degrees." - Emanuel Swedenborg, born Emanujel Swedberg

"What can be more foolish than to think that all this rare fabric of heaven and earth could come by chance, when all the skill of art is not able to make an oyster? To see rare effects, and no cause; a motion, without a mover; a circle, without a centre; a time, without an eternity; a second, without a first: these are things so against philosophy and natural reason, that he must be a beast in understanding who can believe in them. The thing formed, says that nothing formed it; and that which is made, is, while that which made it is not! This folly is infinite!" - Jeremy Taylor

"Mere success is one of the worst arguments in the world of a good cause, and the most improper to satisfy conscience: and yet in the issue it is the most successful of all other arguments, and does in a very odd, but effectual, way, satisfy the consciences of a great many men, by showing them their interest." -

"Taken as a whole, men will only devote their enthusiasm, their time, and their energy to matters in which their passions have a personal interest. But their personal interests, however powerful they may be, will never carry them very far or very high unless they can be made to seem noble and legitimate in their own eyes by being allied to some good cause in which the whole human race can join." - Alexis de Tocqueville, fully Alexis-Charles-Henri Clérel de Tocqueville

"To imagine a man perfectly free and not subject to the law of inevitability, we must imagine him all alone, beyond space, beyond time, and free from dependence on cause." -

"Wealth hath never given happiness, but often hastened misery; enough hath never cause misery, but often quickened happiness." -

"In the beginning of a change, the patriot is a scarce man, and brave, and hated and scorned. When his cause succeeds, the timid join him, for then it costs nothing to be a patriot." -

"Now that man has again evolved to a point where he can make the transition into fourth dimensional consciousness, communication and contacts with extraterrestrial beings has greatly increased. The presence of extraterrestrials should be on of the most reassuring events that is taking place on Earth. Instead, it is often the cause of great fear and apprehension. Fear is born of ignorance. Were it not so, people would welcome their space brothers with open arms. All major governments have repeatedly received information to explain the ET presence. They have been ignored as the product of a deranged mind. At some point some one must come to the realization that the problem of the existence of spacecraft is not going to disappear because man officially refuses to recognize their presence." - Joseph Whitfield

"Only one who devotes himself to a cause with his whole strength and soul can be a true master. For this reason mastery demands all of a person." - Albert Einstein

"Violence never settles anything right: apart from injuring your own soul, it injures the best cause. It lingers on long after the object of hate has disappeared from the scene to plague the lives of those who have employed it against their foes." - Obafemi Awolowo, fully Jeremiah Obafemi Awolowo, commonly known as Awo

"What then does propter hoc add to post hoc? At the factual level, nothing at all, so long as the conjunction is constant in either case... In nature one thing just happens after another. Cause and effect have their place only in our imaginative arrangements and extensions of these primary facts." - A. J. Ayer, Alfred Jules Ayer

"We need to find a form of life that is valuable in itself. What can make a life meaningful? Candidates for this role need to be worthwhile in themselves and not just means to future ends. They need to treat each human life as an autonomous being-for-itself, not merely a being-in-itself to serve some cause beyond it. They need to satisfy our aesthetic and ethical needs, as being both tied to the present moment and existing across time. And there is no reason why such meaning should not be found in this life and not only in a supposed life to come." - Julian Baggini

"She wanted to be the reason for everything and so was the cause of nothing." -

"Leaders are people who focus attention on a vision. They know what they want and are very results-oriented. It’s their intense focus on worthwhile outcomes that draws others to them and to their cause." - Warren Bennis, fully Warren Gamaliel Bennis

"What is found in the effect was already in the cause." - Henri Bergson, aka Henri-Louis Bergson

"There would be no place for hatred among wise men. For who but the foolish would hate good men? And there is no cause to hate bad men. Vice is as a disease of the mind, just as feebleness shows ill-health to the body." -

"Charisma is the ability to inspire followers with devotion and enthusiasm to a cause. It encourages disciples rather than independent persons. It is a way of investing oneself with authority over other rather than vesting others with authority over themselves." - Peter R. Breggin

"If there were a good cause for believing that the earth would be uninhabitable in A.D. 2000 or 2100 the doctrine of Progress would lose its meaning and would automatically disappear." - J. B. Bury, fully John Bagnell Bury

"Technology by itself is never a primary cause of either greatness or decline." - Tom Butler-Bowdon

"When a just cause reaches its flood tide… whatever stands in the way must fall before its overwhelming power." - Carrie Chapman Catt

"The universe shows us nothing save an immense and unbroken chain of cause and effect." - Baron d’Holbach, Paul Henri Thiry, born Paul Heinrich Dietrich

"Common experience shows how much rarer is moral courage than physical bravery. A thousand men will march to the mouth of the cannon where one man will dare espouse an unpopular cause." -

"The universal and the transcendent Cause of all things is neither without life, nor without reason and intelligence; nor is he a body, nor has he form or shape, quality, quantity or weight; nor has he any localized, visible or tangible existence… He suffers no change, corruption, division, privation or flux; none of these things can either be identified with or attributed to him." - Dionysus NULL

"Cultures can mix with one another. Explicit design is introduced to promote, improve, advance, and accelerate the evolutionary process of culture. A change brought about by a science and technology of behavior would correspond to a `biological mutation’ towards the better… Yet the final determining cause, whether genetic or cultural, is never an ethical or moral one, but always leads back to the environment. The world is a large-scale laboratory. Both the controller and the controlled are subject to conditioning. All life is conditioning." - L. Francis Edmunds

"In the grossly distorted individualism of today, we are incapable of imagining the selflessly disinterested hero. This may not matter; we may think we can do without him. But what is also means is that we are incapable of imagining the selflessly disinterested hero in ourselves who would give himself to a cause." - Henry Fairlie

"Zeal, not rightly directed, is pernicious; for as it makes a good cause better, so it makes a bad cause worse." - Farmer’s Almanac NULL

"Every war of the future will be a war of religion, for no country will go to war till it can give its cause the color of a Crusade and so secure for its maintenance absolute loyalty of a heroic quality in the whole population." - W. R. Forrester, fully William Roxburgh Forrester

"The food of events is thought. Your habitual thoughts nourish your conditions and cause them to increase and multiply. Fear thoughts, gloomy and critical thoughts, selfish thoughts, are the food of unhappiness, sickness, and failure. When you supply this food in abundance these things come into your life – because they seek their food. Thoughts of God, thoughts of kindness, of optimism, and good will, are the food of health, joy, and success; and if you furnish a bountiful supply of this food you will attract these things instead." - Emmet Fox

"Evil is like a shadow - it has no real substance of its own, it is simply a lack of light. You cannot cause a shadow to disappear by trying to fight it, stamp on it, by railing against it, or any other form of emotional or physical resistance. In order to cause a shadow to disappear, you must shine light on it." - Shakti Gawain

"`Tis better to have tried in vain sincerely striving for a goal, than to have lived upon the plain an idle and timid soul. `Tis better to have fought and spent your courage, missing all applause, than to have lived in smug content and never ventured for a cause. For he who tries and fails may be the founder of a better day; though never his the victory, form him shall others learn the way." - Edgar Albert Guest, aka Eddie Guest

"If the goal of life is to do the very best one can do at each unfolding moment of existence, then, through spiritual work, one has already escaped the primary cause of suffering. In the stop-frame of the radical present, there is no life story to react to or edit. With this one-pointedness of mind, it soon becomes obvious that everything merely `is as it is’ without comment or adjectives. The illusion of `Now’ is replaced by the reality of `Always’." - David R. Hawkins, fully David Ramon Hawkins

"Nothing in nature needs to do anything; all merely appears to be becoming that which it is. There is no doer of actions; the actions are the doer. One sees potentiality actualizing. In duality, there is a `this’ (me) that is imagined to be the `cause’ of `that’ (action). In Reality, the action and self are one and the same. There is no thinker separate from the thoughts. It is the thoughts themselves that are the only thinker of the moment; they are not different or separate." - David R. Hawkins, fully David Ramon Hawkins

"It takes courage to experience the freedom that comes with autonomy, courage to accept intimacy and directly encounter other persons, courage to take a stand in an unpopular cause, courage to choose authenticity over approval and to choose it again and again, courage to accept the responsibility for your own choices, and, indeed, courage to be the unique person you really are." - Muriel James and Dorothy Jongeward

"The best way to solve a problem is to remove its cause." - Martin Luther King, Jr.

"Out of the best and most productive years of each person's life, they should carve a segment in which they put their private career aside to serve their community and their country, and thereby serve their children, their neighbours, their fellow men, and the cause of freedom." - David Eli Lilienthal, "Mr. TVA"

"Poverty is not the root cause of crime." - Rush Limbaugh

"The cause of all suffering is rooted in desire. If the desire is extinguished suffering has no foot hold." - Mahāyāna Religious Ideal "Great Vehicle" NULL

"The origin is the lack of mutual love… All the disorders of the world have this cause and this alone." - Mozi or Mo-tze, Mocius or Mo-tzu, original name Mo Di, aka Master Mo NULL

"Man is forever climbing up the ladder of secondary causes to the First and Supreme Cause - God Himself." - John A. O’Brien

"The only idea man can affix to the name of God is that of a first cause, the cause of all things. Incomprehensible and difficult as it is for a man to conceive what a first cause is, he arrives at the belief of it from the tenfold greater difficulty of disbelieving it." - Thomas Paine

"Man’s life is subject to afflictions from ignorance, desire, aversion, ego, and attachment – ignorance being the root cause of all afflictions." - Patañjali NULL

"The most disappointing feature of working for a cause is that so few people have a philosophy of life." - Jeanette Rankin

"Men who enter the service of the State should make it their chief study to set out in the world with some notable act which may strike the imagination of the people, and cause themselves to be discussed." -

"There are many things children accept as “grown-up things” over which they have no control and for which they have no responsibility – for instance, weddings, having babies, buying houses, and driving cars. Parents who are separating really need to help their children put divorce on that grown-up list, so that children do not see themselves as the cause of their parents’ decision to live apart." - Fred Rogers, "Mister Rogers," born Frederick McFeely Rogers