Good Motive Quotes

#1. Do not ever say that the desire to "do good" by force is a good motive. Neither power-lust nor stupidity are good motives.

Ayn Rand

#2. Conviction is a good motive, but a bad judge.

Albert Einstein

#3. It is a good motive, fame and money, as it is tangible and measurable. Being an artist is neither measurable nor tangible and certainly not a way to become rich.

Dirk Benedict

#4. We are all selfish and I no more trust myself than others with a good motive.

Lord Byron

#5. Give a good deed the credit of a good motive; and give an evil deed the benefit of the doubt.

Brander Matthews

#6. 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

#7. I am not tormented, Fern responded. I am ... diminished. I have always believed that your soul grows when you do something that is good and brave, a right thing, a true thing, and when you do evil- no matter what the motive- your soul is eroded. Well, my soul is less.

Jan Siegel

#8. Malice will always find bad motives for good actions. - Shall we therefore never do good?

Thomas Jefferson

#9. The good opinion of our fellow men is the strongest, though not the purest motive to virtue.

Charles Caleb Colton

#10. Liberty, next to religion has been the motive of good deeds and the common pretext of crime ...

Lord Acton

#11. That kind always has the public good as a motive to justify every abomination.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

#12. Individual ambition is undoubtedly a strong motive in student work, but there is such a thing among students everywhere as ambition for others, call it class spirit, esprit de corps, good fellowship, or good will to men.

Herbert Baxter Adams

#13. What I do know now, and didn't know then is that, in the long run, motive matters more with good deeds than it does with bad. When all the guilt and shame for the bad we've done have run their course, it's the good we did that can save us.

Gregory David Roberts

#14. The primary motive for good care and good use of the land-community is always going to be affection, which is too often lacking.

Wendell Berry

#15. The morality of an action depends on the motive from which we act. If I fling half a crown to a beggar with intention to break his head and he picks it up and buy victuals with it, the physical effect is good. But with respect to me the action is very wrong.

Samuel Johnson

#16. Humanism inspires a lot of enthusiasm for everyday life and urges people to be better to one another, to work towards a better future and a common good. If I believed there was an afterlife I would have so much less motive for filling this life with every experience that is offered up to me.

Stephen Fry

#17. We are not more ingenious in searching out bad motives for good actions when performed by others, than good motives for bad actions when performed by ourselves.

Charles Caleb Colton

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

Joseph Butler

#19. Every good impulse to which you yielded, every base or selfish one you resisted, every attitude you embraced or rejected, every word, every motive, every act ~ each registered its stamp upon your Self. All contributed to what you became.

Michael Phillips

#20. You need no proof, no reasons, no success, you need not achieve in fact the good of others - all you need to know is that your motive was the good of others, not your own. Your only definition of the good is a negation: the good is the 'non-good for me.

Ayn Rand

#21. The only motive that can keep politics pure is the motive of doing good for one's country and its people.

Henry Ford

#22. Personal initiative, competitive selection, the profit motive, corrected by failure and the infinite process of good housekeeping and the personal ingenuity-here constitute the life of a free society.

Winston Churchill

#23. As a motive for terror, religion has more often than not required a good deal of lubrication by lucre.

Margaret Thatcher

#24. The power generated of ten minds for good is superior to that of ten thousand minds acting on a lower motive. But it is a silent power. It moves in mysterious ways. It is noiseless. It makes no show of open opposition. It uses no methods of effort through tongue or arm or physical force.

Prentice Mulford

#25. Lies are just another kind of storytelling, but with the very distinct and enlivening motive of desperation. Since writers are by nature desperate creatures, they usually do a pretty good (or pretty awful, but always interesting) job of lying.

John Hodgman

#26. 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?

Adam Levin

#27. No motive is pure. No one is good or bad-but a hearty mix of both. And sometimes life actually gives to you by taking away.

Carrie Fisher

#28. In the motive lies the good or ill.

Samuel Johnson

#29. 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

#30. 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

#31. 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.

#32. 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

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

Gregory David Roberts

#34. Everybody who talks to a newspaper has a motive. That's just a given. And good reporters always, repeat always, probe to find out what that motive is.

Ben Bradlee

#35. Since life requires a specific course of action, any other course will destroy it. A being who does not hold his own life as the motive and goal of his actions, is acting on the motive and standard of death.

Ayn Rand

#36. Where destruction is the motive, unity is dangerous. For example, if I have evil intent and I galvanize that evil intent with many others, the capacity to destroy is immense. Where goodness is the motive, unity is phenomenal and actually has some good issues to it.

Ravi Zacharias

#37. Any human being who accepts the help of another, knows that good will is the giver's only motive and that good will is the payment he owes in return.

Ayn Rand

#38. The motive behind criticism often determines its validity. Those who care criticize where necessary. Those who envy criticize the moment they think that they have found a weak spot.

Criss Jami

#39. An action is essentially good if the motive of the agent be good, regardless of the consequences.

Immanuel Kant

#40. I've been pretty good at reading people. If you rockin' with me cause you're just a solid individual, then we're rockin'. But if you got a motive or something, I am going to probably see right through that.

Marshawn Lynch

#41. When our motive for good works is to garner the praise of others, we trade the glory of God for the glory of men. Glorious Lord, forgive me for the times I have exchanged Your glory for the praise of others. Help me keep my focus on You and You alone, rather than on the admiration of others.

Ava Pennington

#42. The noblest motive is the public good.

Virgil

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

Virgil

#44. Human desire is the criterion of all truth and all good. Truth does not lie beyond humanity, but is one of the products of the human mind and feeling. There is really nothing to fear. The motive of fear in religion is base ...

D.H. Lawrence

#45. The Man who works for others, without any selfish motive, really does good to himself.

Ramakrishna

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

William Hazlitt

#47. It is the duty of men to judge men only by their actions. Our faculties furnish us with no means of arriving at the motive, the character, the secret self. We call the tree good from its fruits, and the man, from his works.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

#48. Getting ahead cannot be the only motive that motivates people. You have to imagine what a good life is.

Henry Giroux

#49. The love of admiration leads to fraud, much more than the love of commendation; but, on the other hand, the latter is much more likely to spoil our: good actions by the substitution of an inferior motive.

Richard Whately