Best 132 quotes in «motive quotes» category

Motives reveal why we do what we do, which is actually more important to God than what we're doing.

My principal motive is the belief that we can still make admirable sense of our lives even if we cease to have... an ambition of transcendence.

Never go into business purely to make money. If that's the motive you're better off doing nothing.

Our motive is not to prove our self-worth, but to live up to our possibilities.

Never judge a man's actions until you know his motives

No particular motive for living, except the custom and habit of it.

Occasionally we all do wrong things from right motives. Only time can prove us right or wrong. The past is the past. Nothing can change it now, and who is to say that it was all wrong, anyway?

One must know ones enemy as he is, not as one, for whatever motives, wishes him to be.

Our very best friends have a tincture of jealousy even in their friendship; and when they hear us praised by others, will ascribe it to sinister and interested motives if they can.

The concessions of the privileged to the unprivileged are seldom brought about by any better motive than the power of the unprivileged to extort them.

Profit per se is not my motive.

Right motives give pinions to thought, and strength and freedom to speech and action.

That man is the most loyal who aims at the noblest motive, and that motive the public good.

People who don't know you, you don't know their motives. They smile at you all day, "Oh, that's great. You've done it again! You're the greatest!" And that's not good for an artist.

Ready are we all to cry out and ascribe motives when our toes are pinched.

The meaning of what is said is according to the motive for saying it: because things are not subject to speech, but speech to things. Therefore we should take account of the motive of the lawgiver, rather than of his very words.

The larger crimes are apt to be the simpler, for the bigger the crime, the more obvious, as a rule, is the motive.

The motive power is the cause of all life.

The most terrible of motives and the most unanswerable of responses: Because.

The motive power of democracy is love

There is no reason why humanity cannot be served equally by weighty and trivial motives.

The noblest motive is the public good.

The overcoming of adversity and, ultimately, denying it the rite of passage, has been a constant and perpetual motive throughout my life.

There is no act, however virtuous, for which ingenuity may not find some bad motive.

There is no such thing as an exact synonym and no such thing as an unmixed motive.

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

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

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 writer, like the murderer, needs a motive.

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

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

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

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.

Vanity is a motive of immense potency.

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

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.

... 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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Where destruction is the motive, unity is dangerous.

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.