Best Motive Quotes

#1. Curiosity is the best motive for writing: curiosity about the world at large, or about oneself.

Michael Korda

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

Kingsley Amis

#3. No game in the world is as tidy and dramatically neat as baseball, with cause and effect, crime and punishment, motive and result, so cleanly defined.

Paul Gallico

#4. This is the thing I have discovered: Michael's being gone doesn't mean we stop trying to save him. The strain is less but it doesn't vanish. It becomes part of our bewilderment, a kind of activity without motive, which provides its own strange continuity.

Adam Haslett

#5. I wish for you all, each of you, to have your own motive for indignation. This is precious. When something outrages you as I was outraged by Nazism, then people become militant, strong, and involved.

Stephane Hessel

#6. Since the primary motive of the evil is disguise, one of the places evil people are most likely to be found is within the church. What better way to conceal one's evil from oneself as well as from others than to be a deacon or some other highly visible form of Christian within our culture

M. Scott Peck

#7. Almost every sinful action ever committed can be traced back to a selfish motive. It is a trait we hate in other people but justify in ourselves.

Stephen Kendrick

#8. The difference there is betwixt honor and honesty seems to be chiefly the motive; the mere honest man does that from duty which the man of honor does for the sake of character.

William Shenstone

#9. In this manner, in early days, were formed those vast and prodigious layers of coal, which an ever - increasing consumption must utterly use up in about three centuries more, if people do not find some more economic light than gas, and some cheaper motive power than steam. All

Jules Verne

#10. There are a lot of people who are doing wonderful things, quietly, with no motive of greed, or hostility toward other people, or delusions of superiority.

Charles Kuralt

#11. Whackos like Liberty Association belong in jail. I don't care if they're misguided or had bad childhoods. We've all got problems; we don't all try to kill people we disagree with.

Clancy Nacht

#12. Obstinacy is will asserting itself without being able to justify itself. It is persistence without a reasonable motive. It is the tenacity of self-love substituted for that of reason and conscience.

Henri Frederic Amiel

#13. The human race is where everyone is under control by other people, no one controls his own life; the best thing you can ever do is to choose somebody who controls your life with good motive.

Aiden Mccoy

#14. Motive matters more with good deeds than it does with bad.

Gregory David Roberts

#15. To tell one comprehensive story of how it has happened that what is is, one which shall hold true, come what may, now-after - a story that whatever comes shall perfectly continue or confirm: such is the ideal motive of religions.

Laura Riding

#16. Black Power If the motive is good, and there are no other possibilities, then seen most deeply it [violence] is nonviolence, because its aim is to help others.

Dalai Lama

#17. Doormats. It was true that actors had a perception, an understanding of human motive, that normal people lacked. It had nothing to do with intelligence, and very little to do with education.

Josephine Tey

#18. The Light of lights looks always on the motive, not the deed
The Shadow of Shadows looks on the deed alone.

W.B.Yeats

#19. Why does he see so much risk? "It's a knockoff of the old Sherlock Holmes version of motive, means, and opportunity," he told me.

Anonymous

#20. Where we are from there is no remorse because action has a logical motive and always results in the best outcome for the given situation.

Matt Haig

#21. He is the best sailor who can steer within fewest points of the wind, and exact a motive power out of the greatest obstacles.

Walter Scott

#22. Money is important, but for most people (and certainly for the best people), money isn't the primary motive for their work.

Dave Bruno

#23. God alone is perfectly and consistently just. We forget; God remembers. We see an action; God sees a motive. This qualifies Him as the best recordkeeper and judge.

Charles R. Swindoll

#24. 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.

Charles Caleb Colton

#25. Beautiful words are ugly motives best friends.

Steve Fowler

#26. What ever the motive for the insult, it is always best to overlook it; for folly doesn't deserve resentment, and malice is punished by neglect.

Samuel Johnson

#27. If you are thinking of nything with dependence upon it, there is a motive of curiosity, or pleasure, or success, and though the thinking will help towards satisfaction you will still be in bondage. There is no harm in this, but the higher samadhi, without such motives, is best.

Ernest Wood

#28. If God were a Kantian, who would not have us till we came to Him from the purest and best motives, who could be saved?

C.S. Lewis

#29. there is a consensus in Brazil that the profit motive does not always guarantee the best outcome for society as a whole and that some supervision is therefore necessary.

Larry Rohter

#30. What was Dr. Mera's motive for murder? I don't need to tell that to a writer of detective novels such as yourself. You know well enough yourself that even without a motive, a murderer lives to kill.

Rampo Edogawa

#31. Never question another man's motive. His wisdom, yes, but not his motives.

Dwight D. Eisenhower

#32. Self-defense was an accepted motive for murder.

Farrah Naseem

#33. I don't necessarily find superheroes in general, for me, that appealing. I'd much prefer to play, if I was to be cast in a superhero film, I'd prefer to play the villain because there's a reason, there's a motive behind their madness.

Ryan Kwanten

#34. Because impudence is a vice, it does not follow that modesty is a virtue; it is built upon shame, a passion in our nature, and may be either good or bad according to the actions performed from that motive.

Bernard De Mandeville

#35. Be fair. Don't present your version of the truth to others. Lose your ulterior motives! Be accurate and pure in your presentation of the way, and you will become the way.

Frederick Lenz

#36. The profit motive, indecorous though it may seem, may represent the best chance the poor have to reap some of globalization's benefits.

James Surowiecki

#37. The effectance motive helps explain the progress principle: We get more pleasure from making progress toward our goals than we do from achieving them because, as Shakespeare said, Joy's soul lies in the doing.

Jonathan Haidt

#38. Life always take on the character of its motive.

J.G. Holland

#39. I am a journalist and, under the modern journalist's code of Olympian objectivity (and total purity of motive), I am absolved of responsibility. We journalists don't have to step on roaches. All we have to do is turn on the kitchen light and watch the critters scurry.

P. J. O'Rourke

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

Miguel De Cervantes

#41. Ultimately we must concern ourselves with pulling out by its roots the decadence that controls our culture, the profit motive that controls our culture.

Jane Fonda

#42. That is the best instruction you could ever give a poet: whether you're examining a bad line in a poem or a bad motive for action, keep well your repining - meaning, don't ignore the honest muttering in your head.

Alice Oswald

#43. The men who made the Industrial Revolution are usually pictured as hardfaced businessmen with no other motive than self-interest. That is certainly wrong. For one thing, many of them were inventors who had come into business that way.

Jacob Bronowski

#44. When shallow critics denounce the profit motive inherent in our system of private enterprise, they ignore the fact that it is an economic support of every human right we possess and without it, all rights would disappear.

Dwight D. Eisenhower

#45. You're convinced that there was nothing important here - nothing that would point to any motive. SHERIFF: Nothing here but kitchen things.

Susan Glaspell

#46. 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.

Donna Tartt

#47. All human desire is poised on an axis of paradox, absence and presence its poles, love and hate its motive energies.

Anne Carson

#48. Take away the motive, and you take away the sin.

Miguel De Cervantes

#49. Some people are born with a vital and responsive energy. It not only enables them to keep abreast of the times; it qualifies them to furnish in their own personality a good bit of the motive power to the mad pace.

Kate Chopin

#50. We act unbelievingly and disobediently when, for whatever motive, we distort, falsify, or suppress the facts about our life in nature and history.

Karl Barth

#51. You cannot see a person's heart, belief or motive unless it identifies itself with an action.

Brenda Johnson Padgitt

#52. Few men could explain why they enlisted, and if they attempted they might only prove that they had done as a politician said the electorate does, the right thing from the wrong motive.

Patrick MacGill

#53. He fought because it was considered the 'thing to do,' because he liked the people he had to live with, and because those people wouldn't have a good opinion of him if he didn't fight. People never needed much of a philosophic motive to make them do the socially approved things.

Walter M. Miller Jr.

#54. A supreme love, a motive that gives a sublime rhythm to a woman's life, and exalts habit into partnership with the soul's highest needs, is not to be had where and how she wills.

George Eliot

#55. To be free from all egoistic motive, careful of truth in speech and action, void of self-will and self-assertion, watchful in all things, is the condition for being a flawless servant.

Sri Aurobindo

#56. Go out and heal the sick, raise the dead, cast out demons and preach the kingdom. But do it for only one reason. Your motive should be an overwhelming love and compassion for those in need. There is no other legitimate motive for healing.

Praying Medic

#57. sinful motive often hides itself under the mask of reverence for another virtue.")

Jimmy Swaggart

#58. Motive lies behind action. It is the root of behaviour and attitude, the fuel we need to progress from desire to achievement. In our humanity we are driven to survive, and to be loved makes the living worthwhile.

Sarah Tun