Best 132 quotes in «motive quotes» category

The satisfaction that accompanies good acts is itself not the motivation of the act; satisfaction is not the motive, but only the consequence.

The true motives of our actions, like the real pipes of an organ, are usually concealed; but the gilded and hollow pretext is pompously placed in the front for show.

The vanity of being known to be trusted with a secret is generally one of the chief motives to disclose it.

The ulterior motives with which you absorb and assimilate Evil are not your own but those of Evil.

... we are most of us brought up in the notion that the highest motive for not doing a wrong is something irrespective of the beings who would suffer the wrong.

Traveling outgrows its motives. It soon proves sufficient in itself. You think you are making a trip, but soon it is making you - or unmaking you.

Vanity is so frequently the apparent motive of advice, that we, for the most part, summon our powers to oppose it without any very accurate inquiry whether it is right.

The writer, like the murderer, needs a motive.

This history of culture will explain to us the motives, the conditions of life, and the thought of the writer or reformer.

This unusual and highly successful species spends a great deal of time examining his higher motives and an equal amount of time ignoring his fundamental ones.

Those who joined us for selfish personal reasons, for a career or other motives will be the ones to leave.

To exercise some sort of control over others is the secret motive of every selfish person.

Vanity is a motive of immense potency.

We are thankful for good-will rather than for services, for the motive than the quantum of favor received.

Where destruction is the motive, unity is dangerous.

We do things when it is our time to do them. They do not occur to us until it is time; they cannot be resisted, once their time has come. It's a question of time, not motive.

We in America count on the profit motive to get people to do the right thing. That's our basic American notion when it comes to business.

What we believe to be the motives of our conduct are usually but the pretexts for it.

When starting to think about any novel, part of the motive is: I'm going to show them, this time.

When we pray we link ourselves with an inexhaustible motive power.

We must never forget that human motives are generally far more complicated than we are apt to suppose, and that we can very rarely accurately describe the motives of another.

When the severity of the law is to be softened, let pity, not bribes, be the motive.

When you're a woman with a certain amount of fame and money, you are never certain what someone's motives are.

Where there is no emotion, there is no motive for violence.

Who is sure of their own motives can in confidence advance or retreat.

Women don't require motives that are comprehensible to my intellectual processes.

Why Christians do what they do is just as important as what they do. Bad motives ruin good acts.

You can question somebody's views and their judgment without questioning their motives or patriotism.

You will find in politics that you are much exposed to the attribution of false motive. Never complain and never explain.

You just can't tell or calibrate motive or intelligence or sense. So I don't read anything unless someone tells me that it's really smart or illuminating. I don't read any reviews anymore and it's been really liberating.

Before you work with me you must know that I am an atheist and I believe in neither supreme powers of any God or the trickery of the Devil, I am student of the criminal psychology and believe that behind every murder there is psychopath at work with some insidious agenda at play and motive unknown to human mind.

All the motives for murder are covered by four Ls: Love, Lust, Lucre and Loathing.

A business fails when motive becomes more important than the trust.

A craving is the sense that something is missing. It is a desire to change your internal state. This gap between your current state and your desired state provides a reason to act. Desire is the difference between where you are now and where you want to be in the future. Even the tiniest action is tinged with the motivation to feel differently than you do in the moment. When you binge eat or browse social media, what you really want is not a potato chip or a bunch of likes. What you really want is to feel different.

Hatred and greed are heavy loads. Your motive, on the other hand, is love. And instead of priding yourselves on your cunning, you recognize how weak you are...so weak that you must depend totally on the Spirit of God.

Gurion would lament: What is the good of trying to do justice if God will kill me and my family whether or not I do justice?

But, if I dare say it, it wasn't until I had helped kill a man that I realized how elusive and complex an act a murder can actually be, and not necessarily attributable to one dramatic motive.

I'd rather be befriended as an aimless lost soul than be befriended for adornment, gain or goal.

If she was making the right and courageous decisions, he thought, she was nonetheless unhappy and somewhat resentful about doing it

I have always wanted to kill you, ever since the moment when I learnt of your existence.

If you dont understand the MOTIVE, don't judge the means!

I have always wanted to kill you, all my life led to that blow. Jealousy and hatred compose my earliest memories. I have killed you every day in my thoughts.

More often than not, an inspirational or motivational speaker is someone who makes money from telling us that we can do all of the things that we can do … and pretty much all of the things that we cannot do.

It's all about motive. Climbing up and climbing out look the same on the outside.

It was not the money that was my main motive; it was the challenge and the thrill where I got my kicks. Armed robbery to me was like a sport. To take on an armored vehicle with two armed security guards—it was like an athlete attending the Olympic Games.

. . . most martial artists want to know how A technique is done, A seasoned Sensei will demonstrate why

Loving, of enemies is another dogma of feigned morality, and has besides no meaning. It is incumbent on man, as a moralist, that he does not revenge an injury; and it is equally as good in a political sense, for there is no end to retaliation; each retaliates on the other, and calls it justice: but to love in proportion to the injury, if it could be done, would be to offer a premium for a crime. Besides, the word enemies is too vague and general to be used in a moral maxim, which ought always to be clear and defined, like a proverb. If a man be the enemy of another from mistake and prejudice, as in the case of religious opinions, and sometimes in politics, that man is different to an enemy at heart with a criminal intention; and it is incumbent upon us, and it contributes also to our own tranquillity, that we put the best construction upon a thing that it will bear. But even this erroneous motive in him makes no motive for love on the other part; and to say that we can love voluntarily, and without a motive, is morally and physically impossible. Morality is injured by prescribing to it duties that, in the first place, are impossible to be performed, and if they could be would be productive of evil; or, as before said, be premiums for crime. The maxim of doing as we would be done unto does not include this strange doctrine of loving enemies; for no man expects to be loved himself for his crime or for his enmity. Those who preach this doctrine of loving their enemies, are in general the greatest persecutors, and they act consistently by so doing; for the doctrine is hypocritical, and it is natural that hypocrisy should act the reverse of what it preaches. For my own part, I disown the doctrine, and consider it as a feigned or fabulous morality; yet the man does not exist that can say I have persecuted him, or any man, or any set of men, either in the American Revolution, or in the French Revolution; or that I have, in any case, returned evil for evil.

The longing for company may be no less powerful or irresponsible in its effects than the sexual motive once was.

Self-defense was an accepted motive for murder.

Sometimes people forget the bridge that connected them to success.