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According to the Law of Cause and Effect, every effect must have a cause. In other words, everything that happens has a catalyst; everything that came into being has something that caused it. Things don't just happen by themselves.

By what criterion... can we distinguish among the numberless effects, that are also causes, and among the causes that may, for aught we can know, be also effects, - how can we distinguish which are the means and which are the ends?

There's almost always a point in a book where something happens that triggers the rest of the plot.

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.'

In reality there is no cause or effect, there is only the indifference of the universe.

It is a question of fact, whether the influence of motives be fixed by laws of nature, so that they shall always have the same effect in the same circumstances.

The whole history of science has been the gradual realization that events do not happen in an arbitrary manner, but that they reflect a certain underlying order, which may or may not be divinely inspired.

Can one end anything? A chapter, a paragraph, a sentence even? Doesn't everything one has ever done go on living in spite of subsequent events?

Before the effect one believes in different causes than one does after the effect.

But, in addition, there is, all through the tragedy, a constant alternation of rises and falls in this tension or in the emotional pitch of the work, a regular sequence of more exciting and less exciting sections.