A Quote by Ralph Waldo Emerson

Cause and effect, means and ends, seed and fruit cannot be severed; for the effect already blooms in the cause, the end preexists in the means, the fruit in the seed

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Quote Topics

Cannot Cause Cause And Effect Effect End Ends Fruit Means Seed

Quote Author

Ralph Waldo Emerson
American - Philosopher
May 25, 1803 - April 27, 1882

He who eats the fruit should at least plant the seed; ay, if possible, a better seed than that whose fruit he has enjoyed.

Henry David Thoreau

A good book is like a seed: it produces fruit that has in it seed for more fruit. It is not a picture on the wall; it is a window that invies us to wider horizons.

Warren W. Wiersbe

We will never have peace in the world until men everywhere recognize that ends are not cut off from means, because the means represent the ideal in the making, and the end in process, and ultimately you can't reach good ends through evil means, because the means represent the seed and the end represents the tree.

Martin Luther King, Jr.

When Da Vinci wanted an effect, he willed, he planned the means to make it happen: that was the purpose of his machines. But the machines of Newton ... are means not for doing but for observing. He saw an effect, and he looked for its cause.

Jacob Bronowski

As the cause is, so the effect will be Cause is never different from effect, the effect is but the cause reproduced in another form.

Swami Vivekananda

On the whole, my respect for my fellow-men, except as one may outweigh a million, is not being increased these days.... Such do not know that like the seed is the fruit, and that, in the moral world, when good seed is planted, good fruit is inevitable, and does not depend on our watering and cultivating; that when you plant, or bury, a hero in his field, a crop of heroes is sure to spring up. This is a seed of such force and vitality, that it does not ask our leave to germinate.

Henry David Thoreau

There cannot be a cause without an effect, the present must have had its cause in the past and will have its effect in the future.

Swami Vivekananda

The seed of God is in us. If the seed had a good, wise and industrious cultivator, it would thrive all the more and grow up to God whose seed it is, and the fruit would be equal to the nature of God. Now the seed of a pear tree grows into a pear tree, a hazel seed into a hazel tree, and the seed of God into God.

Meister Eckhart

You can’t reach good ends through evil means, because the means represent the seed and the end represents the tree.

Martin Luther King, Jr.

In the beginning, compassion is like the seed without which we cannot have any fruit; in the middle, compassion is like water to nourish the see we have planted; in the end, compassion is like the warmth of the sun that brings the fruit to ripening.

Gautama Buddha

Let none of you have a soul which is barren and without fruit. Let nobody be unloving or unreceptive to the spiritual seed. May each of you eagerly accept the celestial seed, the word of salvation (cf. Lk. 8:11), and by your own efforts bring it to perfection as a heavenly work and fruit pleasing to God. Let no one make a beginning of a good work which brings no fruit to perfection (cf. Lk. 8:14), nor declare his faith in Christ only with His tongue.

Gregory Palamas

God is the Seed; The Universe is the Tree, Impulses and passions are the branches, Intelligence is the flower, Pure Consciousness is the fruit, Love is the sweetness in the fruit.

Sathya Sai Baba

One should not wrongly reify 'cause' and 'effect,' as the natural scientists do (and whoever, like them, now 'naturalizes' in his thinking), according to the prevailing mechanical doltishness which makes the cause press and push until it 'effects' its end; one should use 'cause' and 'effect' only as pure concepts, that is to say, as conventional fictions for the purpose of designation and communication-not for explanation.

Friedrich Nietzsche

They [anarchists] spring from a single seed, no matter the flowering of their ideas. The seed is liberty. And that is all it is. It is not a socialist seed. It is not a capitalist seed. It is not a mystical seed. It is not a determinist seed. It is simply a statement. We can be free. After that it’s all choice and chance.

Karl Hess

General Systems Theory, a related modern concept [to holism], says that each variable in any system interacts with the other variables so thoroughly that cause and effect cannot be separated. A simple variable can be both cause and effect. Reality will not be still. And it cannot be taken apart! You cannot understand a cell, a rat, a brain structure, a family, a culture if you isolate it from its context. Relationship is everything.