“All successful men have agreed in one thing,–they were causationists. They believed that things went not by luck, but by law; that there was not a weak or a cracked link in the chain that joins the first and the last of things. A belief in causality, or strict connection between every trifle and the principle of being, and, in consequence, belief in compensation, or, that nothing is got for nothing,–characterizes all valuable minds, and must control every effort that is made by an industrious one.”

in Ralph Waldo Emerson, Success, Writers