Russell Banks Quotes

Human beings rarely do things for a binary reason.

Human beings do things for a reason, even if sometimes it's the wrong reason.

Every character has their reasons - even the characters who do dumb things.

All human actions have one or more of these seven causes: chance, nature, compulsions, habit, reason, passion, desire.

Life's complicated and people do things for a lot of reasons.

Motives are often more important than actions

Our actions are the results of our intentions and our intelligence.

You have to think an awful lot about your motivations or people's behavioral intentions or what their body language can indicate or what's really going on or what makes people sometimes do, sometimes, the irrational things they do.

There are threads in our lives. You pull one, and everything else gets affected.

There are more reasons for people's actions than the number of actions that are actually set in motion.

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.

I wouldn't change a single thing, because one change alters every moment that follows it.

It is impossible, in principle, to explain any pattern by invoking a single quantity.

We are too much accustomed to attribute to a single cause that which is the product of several, and the majority of our controversies come from that.

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 no limit to how complicated things can get, on account of one thing always leading to another.

No one does anything from a single motive.

Actions will be judged according to intentions.

The world is interconnected and causations run in many directions at once.

Coaching is very complex: it's like a puzzle, and many things need to come together to make it work.

Understand: any phenomenon in the world is by nature complex. The people you deal with are equally complex. Any action sets off a limitless chain of reactions. It is never so simple as A leads to B. B will lead to C, D and beyond.

Nothing in life is without cause and effect. Nothing is merely a shell. Everything has some motive.

I wouldn't have changed a thing in my past. Life is like dominoes: if you move one, it wouldn't fall the right way.

If we want to make sense of our behavior - all the best, worst, and everything in between - we're not going to get anywhere if we think it can all be explained with one thing, whether it's one part of the brain, one childhood experience, one hormone, one gene, or anything.

Everything you touch touches you.