“Human knowledge and human power meet in one; for where the cause is not known the effect cannot be produced. Nature to be commanded must be obeyed; and that which in contemplation is as the cause is in operation as the rule.”
Aphorism 3
Novum Organum (1620), Book I
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Francis Bacon 295
English philosopher, statesman, scientist, jurist, and auth… 1561–1626Related quotes

“Every cause produces more than one effect.”
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“Remember always that the cause of the United States is the cause of human nature.”
Letter to Charles F. Adams (1863), as quoted in Papers Relating to the Foreign Relations of the United States, Volume 2 https://books.google.com/books?id=xe9TAAAAcAAJ&pg=PA150&lpg=PA150&dq=%22the+cause+of+the+United+States+is+the+cause+of+human%22&source=bl&ots=WHM-9fK5zZ&sig=3aspBI67n5cNTU2ARF6OaNTyCDQ&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0CB4Q6AEwAGoVChMIt7WJl9msxwIViDI-Ch3mpgBq#v=onepage&q=%22the%20cause%20of%20the%20United%20States%20is%20the%20cause%20of%20human%22&f=false, p. 150.

Sweet Morality (p. 235)
The Immortalization Commission: The Strange Quest to Cheat Death (2011)

“Nature cannot be commanded except by being obeyed.”

The Art of Magic (1891)
Context: No one regards the magician today as other than an ordinary man gifted with no extraordinary powers. The spectators come, not to be impressed with awe, but fully aware that his causes and effects are natural. They come rather as a guessing committee, to spy out the methods with which he mystifies. Hundreds of eyes are upon him. Men with more knowledge of the sciences than he come to trip and expose him, and to baffle their scrutiny is the study of his life. Long years of training and exercise alone will not make a magician. … There must be some natural aptitude for the art; it must be born in a man, and can never be acquired by rule. He must be alert both in body and in mind; cool and calculating to the movement of a muscle under all circumstances; a close student of men and human nature. To these qualifications he must add the rather incongruous quality of a mind turning on contradictions. With a scientific cause he must produce a seemingly opposite effect to that warranted by order and system.
I know of no life requiring such a series of opposite qualities as the magician's. And after the exercise of all these qualities I have named, resulting in the production of the most startling and novel results, the magician has not the satisfaction, like other men, of the enjoyment of his own product. He must be prepared to see it copied by others, or after a short time discovered by the public.

“Music produces a kind of pleasure which human nature cannot do without.”
Source: The Book of Rites

“Human nature is evil, and goodness is caused by intentional activity.”
Quoted in: Fayek S. Hourani (2012) Daily Bread for Your Mind and Soul, p. 336.