It is universally allowed that nothing exists without a cause of its existence, and that chance, when strictly examined, is a mere negative word, and means not any real power which has anywhere a being in nature.
— from An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding by David Hume

No employer wants a clerk, or stenographer, or other employee about him who contaminates the atmosphere.
— from Pushing to the Front by Orison Swett Marden

Are you for the good cause?" "There can be no effect without a cause," modestly answered Candide; "the whole is necessarily concatenated and arranged for the best.
— from Candide by Voltaire

That other objects, considered merely as ideas , are like his body, that is, like it, fill space (which itself can only be present as idea), and also, like it, are causally active in space, is indeed demonstrably certain from the law of causality which is a priori valid for ideas, and which admits of no effect without a cause; but apart from the fact that we can only reason from an effect to a cause generally, and not to a similar cause, we are still in the sphere of mere ideas, in which alone the law of causality is valid, and beyond which it can never take us.
— from The World as Will and Idea (Vol. 1 of 3) by Arthur Schopenhauer

“There’s no effect without a cause,” said the doctor.
— from Project Gutenberg Compilation of 233 Short Stories of Chekhov by Anton Pavlovich Chekhov

There can be no society without exchange, no exchange without a common standard of measurement, no common standard of measurement without equality.
— from Emile by Jean-Jacques Rousseau

With pitiless logic he criticized their extravagance and pretension; and actively anticipating the spirit of modern science, he accepted no fact, he subscribed to no theory, which he had not examined with a cold impartiality.
— from Lucian's True History by of Samosata Lucian

At that moment he returned from his new expedition, wearing a curiously startled air.
— from The Phantom of the Opera by Gaston Leroux

He may not eat while a corpse is in the town, and he may not mourn for the dead.
— from The Golden Bough: A Study of Magic and Religion by James George Frazer

We are beginning to find that there is no effect without a cause, and that the conduct of individuals is not an exception to this law.
— from The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll, Complete Contents Dresden Edition—Twelve Volumes by Robert Green Ingersoll

If you don't, you may read it in the faces of nearly every woman, and child too, after a certain age, in the country.
— from Ginger-Snaps by Fanny Fern

From its apparently impenetrable depths came his warning calls, and on rare and blessed occasions his heavenly song; for it was July, and it is only in June that "New England woods at close of day, With that clear chant are ringing."
— from Upon The Tree-Tops by Olive Thorne Miller

The situation was altered, yet the dead man, although I had dispatched him noiselessly, had not expired without a cry.
— from Rule of the Monk; Or, Rome in the Nineteenth Century by Giuseppe Garibaldi

A chip-potato and a little celery; you should eat nothing else with a canvas-back duck, though some persons, I observe, take currant or cranberry jelly with it.
— from Henry Irving's Impressions of America Narrated in a Series of Sketches, Chronicles, and Conversations by Joseph Hatton

Here's a crop of wheat, potatoes, and buckwheat; after them (at any rate every other year), vines and olives, that will grow on the mountains where nothing else will, and come off late, after the other crops are out of the way; then silk in the latter part of winter and the early spring, before work is driving."
— from The Young Deliverers of Pleasant Cove The Pleasant Cove Series by Elijah Kellogg

From all these circumstances I am satisfied, first, that Mr. Smith did not express the opinion in favor of the separation of the Union, in the sense attributed to him by Colonel Taylor; and, in the next place, if he did, it was not expressed with any criminal intent.
— from Abridgment of the Debates of Congress, from 1789 to 1856, Vol. 3 (of 16) by United States. Congress

In the beginning of time the world did not exist; water and clouds, which continually clashed against each other in space, then formed the universe.
— from The Adventurers by Gustave Aimard