Top 100 Motive Quotes
#1. Self-defense was an accepted motive for murder.
Farrah Naseem
#2. 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
#3. 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
#4. 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
#5. 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
#6. 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
#7. Life always take on the character of its motive.
J.G. Holland
#8. 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
#9. When the severity of the law is to be softened, let pity, not bribes, be the motive.
Miguel De Cervantes
#10. 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
#11. 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
#12. 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
#13. 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
#14. Never question another man's motive. His wisdom, yes, but not his motives.
Dwight D. Eisenhower
#15. 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
#16. All human desire is poised on an axis of paradox, absence and presence its poles, love and hate its motive energies.
Anne Carson
#18. 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
#19. 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
#20. You cannot see a person's heart, belief or motive unless it identifies itself with an action.
Brenda Johnson Padgitt
#21. 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
#22. 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.
#23. 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
#25. 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
#26. 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
#27. sinful motive often hides itself under the mask of reverence for another virtue.")
Jimmy Swaggart
#28. 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
#29. You're convinced that there was nothing important here - nothing that would point to any motive. SHERIFF: Nothing here but kitchen things.
Susan Glaspell
#30. 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
#31. 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
#32. 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
#33. 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
#34. 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
#35. 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
#36. 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
#37. 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
#38. 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
#39. 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
#40. 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
#41. 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
#43. 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
#44. When starting to think about any novel, part of the motive is: I'm going to show them, this time.
Kingsley Amis
#45. 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
#46. The Light of lights looks always on the motive, not the deed
The Shadow of Shadows looks on the deed alone.
W.B.Yeats
#47. 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
#48. However, it must not be assumed that bullshit always and necessarily has pretentiousness as its motive.
Harry G. Frankfurt
#49. People instinctively know the difference between something done with a profit motive and something done with a love motive.
Philip Yancey
#50. A man may act as his conscience dictates so long as he does not infringe upon the rights of others. That is the spirit of true democracy, and all government by the Priesthood should be actuated by that same high motive.
David O. McKay
#51. Twenty-five thousand," Maggie murmured. A tidy sum, even tidier ten years ago. "You're telling me you think the money was the motive for murder?" "Money's always a motive for murder, and it's a loose end.
Nora Roberts
#52. When we pray we link ourselves with an inexhaustible motive power.
Alexis Carrel
#53. One might almost say that the history of geographical discovery, properly so called, begins with Captain Cook, the motive of whose voyages was purely scientific curiosity.
Joseph Jacobs
#54. Barrayar is bred in my bones. I cannot shake it, no matter how far I travel. This struggle, God knows, has no honor in it. But exile, for no other motive than ease - that would be to give up all hope of honor. The last defeat, with no seed of future victory in it.
Lois McMaster Bujold
#55. War, waged from whatever motive, extinguishes the sentiment of reason and justice in the mind.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
#56. The main motive for "nonattachment" is a desire to escape from the pain of living, and above all from love, which, sexual or non-sexual, is hard work.
George Orwell
#57. Socialism proposes no adequate substitute for the motive of enlightened selfishness that today is at the basis of all human labor and effort, enterprise and new activity.
William Howard Taft
#58. Know that all sins and all evils can be summed up in that one word, weakness. It is weakness that is the motive power in all evil doing; it is weakness that makes men injure others; it is weakness that makes them manifest what they are not in reality. Let them know what they really are ...
Swami Vivekananda
#59. The experience of helping a fellow man in danger, or even of training in a realistic manner to be ready to give this help, tends to change the balance of power in a youth's inner life with the result that compassion can become the master motive.
Kurt Hahn
#60. This it is to be a man of the highest type: to be and not seem; to do and not simply to talk; to have the right ideal, the true motive and patiently to transform conduct in accordance with it.
Ossian Everett Mills
#61. Why, for example, should a group of simple, stable compounds of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen struggle for billions of years to organise themselves into a professor of chemistry? What's the motive?
Robert M. Pirsig
#62. Dissolving differences has always been an important motive for my writing, right from 'The Mistress of Spices.'
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
#63. Women never learn to dispense with the sentimental motive in their judgments of men.
Edith Wharton
#64. See a person's means ... Observe his motives. Examine that in which he rests. How can a person conceal his character?
Confucius
#65. Revenge is a frequent motive in suicides, you know. They feel it is someone's fault their lives have been unsuccessful, and they want to inflict this guilt on others by committing suicide.
Jo Nesbo
#66. The profit motive, when it is the sole basis of an economic system, encourages a cutthroat competition and selfish ambition that inspires men to be more concerned about making a living than making a life.
Martin Luther King Jr.
#67. God's motive for creating you was his love.
Rick Warren
#68. 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
#69. Historically, alliances had been formed to augment a nation's strength in case of war; as World War I approached, the primary motive for war was to strengthen the alliances.
Henry Kissinger
#70. The main thing in measuring integrity is someone's motive and intent, not how many records they sell. Our intent in Ministry was never to be big. We just wanted to make enough money to live and to buy a studio, which we have done in Austin.
Al Jourgensen
#71. When a man resists sin on human motive only, he will not hold out long.
Daniel H. Wilson
#72. The motive force of history is truth and not lies.
Leon Trotsky
#73. For his part, the stranger was drifting in Annabel's direction, yet not very deliberately. As if, in some way, he were being drawn to her, by some (unconscious) motion or motive of Annabel herself. Why
Joyce Carol Oates
#74. The profit motive promotes economic growth by creating better products at cheaper prices.
Mark Skousen
#75. I would sooner look for figs on thistles than for the higher attributes of art from one whose ruling motive ... is money.
Asher Brown Durand
#76. Economists talk about profit motive, but nothing motivates modern man more than a chance to avoid taxes!
Peter Drucker
#77. You must lay aside your greed; have no unworthy motive in your desire to become rich and powerful. It is legitimate and right to desire riches, if you want them for the sake of your soul, but not if you desire them for the lists of the flesh.
Wallace D. Wattles
#78. The main question ... is not what motive inspired the law, but what it will be possible for men of bad motive to do with the law ...
Benjamin Tucker
#79. The more we learn, the less and less motive we find for suicide? But for murder, we begin to have a surprising collection of motives!
Agatha Christie
#81. The Lord would so cleanse the motive and desires of our hearts that we will seek but one thing only, and that is, His glory.
Smith Wigglesworth
#82. I believe absolutely in love being the central motive force of the universe.
Laurence Housman
#83. Things that appear to be complicated - and that in fact are complicated - are very simple where motives are concerned. Motive is the root of desire, so to speak. The important thing is to seek out the root. Dig beneath the complicated surface of reality
Haruki Murakami
#84. 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
#85. From a moral point of view, there is no excuse for terrorist acts, regardless of the motive or the situation under which they are carried out.
Jurgen Habermas
#86. Every relationship is governed by motive, capability and reliability and these three factors become the core components of the trust equation
David Amerland
#87. Should we still be friends when it could be more profitable if otherwise?
Toba Beta
#88. I became bored - that was all. Boredom, which is another name and a frequent disguise for vitality, became the unconscious motive of all my acts.
F Scott Fitzgerald
#90. Anybody who knows him, even all the girls, will tell you he's a great guy, and they'll do anything for him, right up until they want to kill him.
Jennifer Echols
#91. I maintain that the cosmic religious feeling is the strongest and noblest motive for scientific research.
Albert Einstein
#92. Never go into business purely to make money. If that's the motive you're better off doing nothing.
Richard Branson
#93. We have a Father, and He cares about our internal world - issues of motive, issues of fear, issues of validation.
John Eldredge
#94. If we are devoted to the cause of humanity, we shall soon be crushed and broken-hearted, for we shall often meet with more ingratitude from men than we would from a dog; but if our motive is love to God, no ingratitude can hinder us from serving our fellow men.
Oswald Chambers
#95. Compassion being action without motive, without self-interest, without any sense of fear, without any sense of pleasure.
Jiddu Krishnamurti
#96. Prayer is not an agency by which my will is to be accomplished upon the earth. The purpose of prayer is to get God's will to be accomplished upon the earth, and so many times we ask and receive not because the motive behind our asking is really that of accomplishing my will rather than God's will.
Chuck Smith
#98. Spiritual awakening is the most essential thing in man's life, and it is the sole purpose of being. Is not civilization, in all its tragic forms, a supreme motive for spiritual awakening?
Khalil Gibran
#99. Christ in me" means Christ bearing me along from within, Christ the motive power that carries me on, Christ giving my whole life a wonderful poise and lift, and turning every burden into wings . . . not as something you have to bear but as something by which you are borne.
James Bryan Smith
#100. The true worth of a soul is revealed as much by the motive it attributes to the actions of others as by its own deeds.
Jean Antoine Petit-Senn
