Best 132 quotes in «motive quotes» category

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.

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

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

Profit per se is not my motive.

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

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

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.

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

The motive power of democracy is love

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

Vanity is a motive of immense potency.

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.

... 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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Where destruction is the motive, unity is dangerous.

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