Top 100 Motives Of Quotes
#1. An old advertising maxim says you've got to spell out the benefit of the benefit. In other words, people don't buy quarter-inch drill bits. They buy quarter-inch holes so they can hang their children's pictures.
Chip Heath
#2. Arthur was not one of those interesting characters whose subtle motives can be dissected. He was only a simple and affectionate man, because Merlyn had believed that love and simplicity were worth having.
T.H. White
#3. Each instance of sexual harassment has to be judged on its merits. Facts, timing, motives, credibility: all must be considered before we make up our own minds what to believe.
Anna Quindlen
#4. What America did in Vietnam and the Congo - we feel. And as a result come these demonstrations. I am not defending the act of burning USIS books. We deplore it. But we can understand the motives of the students.
Sukarno
#5. 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
#6. Motives are better than actions. Men drift into crime. Of evil they do more than they contemplate, and of good they contemplate more than they do.
Christian Nestell Bovee
#7. It is hard to work for years with pure motives, and all the time be looked upon by most of those to whom our lives are devoted as having some sinister object in view.
David Livingstone
#8. The things that converge in the writing of a play come from a complex of motives, a genesis shrouded in a certain kind of mystery.
Athol Fugard
#9. I realized that searching was my symbol, the emblem of those who go out at night with nothing in mind, the motives of a destroyer of compasses.
Julio Cortazar
#10. The beauty and riddle in studying the motives of any politician is in trying to decide what is idealism and what is self-interest; and often we are left to conclude that the answer is a mixture of the two.
Boris Johnson
#11. In fact, because the unself-aware - which includes basically everybody - are impervious to uncharitable perceptions of their underlying motives, all these insights you have into people and what makes them tick are surprisingly useless.
Lionel Shriver
#12. Thus, relativism removes one of our most powerful motives to study the views of the other-the idea that the other might be right and we might be wrong.
David Detmer
#13. The hippie movement politicized my generation. When it ended, we all started looking back at our own history, looking, in my case, for motives of rebellion.
Vivienne Westwood
#14. I do not think one can assess a writer's motives without knowing something of his early development. His subject matter will be determined by the age he lives in ... but before he ever begins to write he will have acquired an emotional attitude from which he will never completely escape.
George Orwell
#15. I have to blame myself for not finding any way of reaching him, but I can't feel that either Ruth or I had anything much to do with his corruption.
His personal motives were freedom and pleasure, and he misread them both.
Wallace Stegner
#16. But decent motives don't always produce decent results. And the body is not the only target of rape. Violence does not always take visible form, and not all wounds gush blood." ~the dowager
Haruki Murakami
#17. Even if people are suspicious of the motives I think that learning and speaking two languages can only be a good thing for people.
Stephen Harper
#18. In 'Diary,' the motto really is: 'Where Do You Get Your Inspiration?' It coaches us to be aware of our motives and not just be a reaction to the circumstances around us.
Chuck Palahniuk
#19. I'm realising my dream of owning a top football club. Some will doubt my motives, others will think I'm crazy.
Roman Abramovich
#20. When Christianity is received, it stimulates the faculties, and calls forth new ideas, new motives and new sentiments. It has been the mother of all modern education
James McCosh
#21. Anyhow, all mankind's ideas and interests, all human aims and motives, are exhibited, fully formed, in a three-year-old child. The kid is just operating on a smaller scale and lacks the advantage of having made enormous soft-money campaign contributions to political candidates.
P. J. O'Rourke
#22. I think it's a waste of time to worry about the motives of why people are supportive of things. I think we should look at the thing itself. And if they're supportive of something that's sexist or racist, then it's a bad thing, but it's not because they're supportive of it that it's a bad thing.
Lawrence Weiner
#23. Our motives and thoughts ultimately influence our actions. Jesus repeatedly emphasized the power of good thoughts and proper motives: 'Look unto me in every thought; doubt not, fear not'
In Proverbs we read, 'For as he thinketh in his heart, so is he
Dieter F. Uchtdorf
#24. What is obnoxious about the motives of politicians - whatever those motives may be - is that politicians must announce their motives as visionary and grand.
P. J. O'Rourke
#25. The sinful actions of men may be sinful, either from the motives which prompt them, the ends in view, or the means by which they are accomplished. God may concur in such acts, from motives, with ends, and in the use of means which are altogether most holy
James Petigru Boyce
#26. The human mind is indeed a cave swarming with strange forms of life, most of them unconscious and unilluminated. Unless we can understand something as to how the motives that issue from this obscurity are generated, we can hardly hope to foresee or control them.
Charles Horton Cooley
#27. The larger the corporation, the more distant its motives are apt to be from the original spirit of organic farming - and the farther the products will likely be shipped to buyers who will smile at the happy farm picture on the package, and never be the wiser.
Barbara Kingsolver
#28. We need to expose the motives of our political leaders, point out their connections to corporate power, show how huge profits are being made out of death and suffering.
Howard Zinn
#29. There are not anywhere else so many ways of trickery, so many false lights, so many veils, so many guises, so many illusive deceits, as are practiced in every man's conscience in respect to his motives, thoughts, feelings, conduct, and character.
Henry Ward Beecher
#30. Every soul is a soul. It is the motives, deeds and actions that define the personality of each soul.
Lailah Gifty Akita
#31. The thought was sobering. How many people's motives didn't match up with what I'd taken for their actions? How many villains were the heroes of their own stories? I didn't know, and I was terribly afraid that I was never going to find out.
Mira Grant
#32. People talk of their motives in a cut and dried way. Every woman is supposed to have the same set of motives, or else to be a monster. I am not a monster but I have not felt exactly what other women feel, or say they feel, for fear of being thought unlike others.
George Eliot
#33. 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.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#34. I thought my heart was pure. We do like to have such good opinions of our own motives when we're about to do something harmful, to someone else.
Margaret Atwood
#35. Totalitarianism spells simplification: an enormous reduction in the variety of aims, motives, interests, human types, and, above all, in the categories and units of power.
Eric Hoffer
#36. The moment we begin to fear the opinions of others and hesitate to tell the truth that is in us, and from motives of policy are silent when we should speak, the divine floods of light and life no longer flow into our souls.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
#37. Have you fallen into the world's trap, following its self-indulgent goals and driven by its self-centered motives? It can happen without you even being aware of it. Make sure Christ is first in your life, and make it your goal to live according to His Word.
Billy Graham
#38. Inspiration is allowed to do whatever it wants to, in fact, and it is never obliged to justify its motives to any of us.
Elizabeth Gilbert
#39. Achieving the good life is more a matter of being than of doing or giving. It calls for intense self-scrutiny, a relentless honesty about one's motives, and a persistent feeling that we are no better - and perhaps worse - than those we are trying to help.
Sydney J. Harris
#40. 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.
Desmond Morris
#41. Men's hearts are being searched ... it is a tremendous sifting time, not only of actions but of inner motives. Nothing can escape the all-searching eye of God.
Frank Bartleman
#42. Even truth becomes just another weapon of division and violence, when shared with impure motives and a defiled heart.
Hope D. Blackwell
#43. But gossip must see its characters in black and white, equip them with sins and motives easily conveyed in the shorthand of conversation.
John Le Carre
#44. Never go to another woman about your woman. Not unless you want an insidious form of advice.
Donna Lynn Hope
#45. He ran because his decision had been made. It had been made for him by the convergence of half-forgotten motives, of desires and reasons, of varied yet congruous impulses. And the convergence of all these to a focus point of action.
Mervyn Peake
#46. What a beautiful testament to the creative spirit and its true motives, to creative contribution coming from a place of purpose rather than a hunger for profit.
Leonard Cohen
#47. There is an institutional cynicism that causes reporters to question everything the President says, and the motives of everything the President and his Administration try to accomplish.
Dee Dee Myers
#48. I like the image of The Old Man and the Sea, of striving and succeeding but finding that the success was ghost success. In other words, in the long run, after a certain age, the motives for success, pride or oppressing people or getting power.
Allen Ginsberg
#49. Personalities are like impressionistic paintings. At a distance, each person is 'all of a piece'; up close, each is a bewildering complexity of moods, cognitions, and motives.
Theodore Millon
#50. We can at least try to understand our own motives, passions, and prejudices, so as to be conscious of what we are doing when we apeal to those of others. This is very difficult, because our own prejudice and emotional bias always seems to us so rational.
T. S. Eliot
#51. 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
#52. It is one of the primary motives of modern art that it wants to abolish the distance which the viewer, the consumer, the audience maintain vis-a-vis a work of art.
Hans-Georg Gadamer
#53. Quite a lot of people wanted me to write about my family, I suppose for fairly obvious reasons, and there was always something that would stop me, I thought they were asking me for the wrong motives.
Emma Tennant
#54. 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
#55. The only words free of suspicious motives will be the ones I find in books.
Michelle Moran
#56. No period of history has ever been great or ever can be that does not act on some sort of high, idealistic motives, and idealism in our time has been shoved aside, and we are paying the penalty for it.
Alfred North Whitehead
#57. We must rapidly begin the shift from a "thing-oriented" society to a "person-oriented" society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.
Martin Luther King Jr.
#59. If you are kind, people may accuse you of ulterior motives. Be kind anyway.
Mother Teresa
#60. 1 Corinthians 4:5 Therefore judge nothing before the appointed time; wait until the Lord comes. He will bring to light what is hidden in darkness and will expose the motives of the heart. At that time each will receive their praise from God.
Bible. New International Version
#62. Homelessness is the fundamental idea of salvation in Jainism. It means the breaking off of all earthly relations, and therefore, above all, indifference to general impressions and avoidance of all worldly motives, the ceasing to act, to hope, to desire.
Max Weber
#63. Capitalism is the extraordinary belief that the nastiest of men for the nastiest of motives will somehow work together for the benefit of all.
John Maynard Keynes
#64. What time can be more beautiful than the one in which the finest virtues, innocent cheerfulness and indefinable longing for love constitute the sole motives of your life?
Leo Tolstoy
#65. If President Obama has his way, you won't recognize the government, the free market system, or, frankly, America as you once knew it. His admonitions and his audacious policy goals demonstrate very clear motives: equalize, discourage dissent, and become a nation of apologists.
Bob Ehrlich
#66. Resolutely ignoring Banu's dark mutterings, steeling herself against the barrage of harsh words that questioned her motives, her upbringing, and her morality
Thrity Umrigar
#67. If there was the same propensity in mankind for investigating the motives, as there is for censuring the conduct, of public characters, it would be found that the censure so freely bestowed is oftentimes unmerited and uncharitable.
George Washington
#68. When you're a woman with a certain amount of fame and money, you are never certain what someone's motives are.
Patricia Richardson
#69. The power of free will is developed and confirmed by increasing the number of worthy motives which influence conduct.
John Lancaster Spalding
#70. Giving and taking are based on our motives and values, and they're choices that we make regardless of whether our personalities trend agreeable or disagreeable.
Adam M. Grant
#71. Above all, ascribe no decent motives to the federal government. Always and everywhere, it is the enemy of truth.
Llewellyn Rockwell
#72. The citizens of the United States have peculiar motives to support the energy of their constitutional charters.
James Madison
#73. What we believe to be the motives of our conduct are usually but the pretexts for it.
Miguel De Unamuno
#74. Heroes are those who can somehow resist the power of the situation and act out of noble motives, or behave in ways that do not demean others when they easily can.
Philip G. Zimbardo
#75. Or perhaps it was curiosity that motivated them after all, that earliest of motives, the most human and the most suspect, the one that had led Adam to the Tree, in the dawn of Story.
Lavie Tidhar
#76. World events are the work of individuals whose motives are often frivolous, even casual.
Gore Vidal
#77. Of all the vices incident to man, lying is the most mean, most contemptible; it evinces a very weak, depraved heart, which shrinks at the exposure of motives and of actions.
Josiah Bartlett
#78. You will perceive by my preaching that I am growing old: it is the privilege of years, and I am sure you will pardon it from the purity of it's motives.
Thomas Jefferson
#79. It is the greatest scam in history. I am amazed, appalled and highly offended by it. Global Warming; It is a scam. Some dastardly scientists with environmental and political motives manipulated long term scientific data to create an illusion of rapid global warming.
John Coleman
#80. We can only write well about our sins because it is too difficult to recall a virtuous act or even whether it was the result of good or evil motives.
Edward Dahlberg
#81. I agree with Schopenhauer that one of the most powerful motives that attracts people to science and art is the longing to escape from everyday life.
Albert Einstein
#82. Every diminution of the public burdens arising from taxation gives to individual enterprise increased power and furnishes to all the members of our happy confederacy new motives for patriotic affection and support.
Andrew Jackson
#83. I really think of my motives, my melodies, my harmonies, as being these things that are very much alive. They have these little lives of their own that are stretched and pulled, and I do conceive of my music in a very narrative way.
Missy Mazzoli
#84. We, unlike Nazi Germany or Mussolini's Italy, have never stopped being a nation of laws, not of men. But witness how men with motives and a majority can manipulate law to cruel and unjust ends.
Robert Byrd
#85. If we rush ceaselessly through disconnected activities without checking in on our moods or motives, we can lose track of ourselves; in a sense, we lose the ability to experience our experiences. A
Eva Hoffman
#86. One little human truth is that opinionated people don't hold much with other people's opinions, and it is a great pleasure to some of them to be able to ascribe incurable defects, such as belonging to a certain sex; or base motives, or lack of understanding, to anyone whose views they disagree with.
Katherine Anne Porter
#87. I don't think anyone doubts my motives, really. I do what I do and it's not very complicated. Of course, you might hate the music that I make, but I don't think people feel threatened by me just getting on with what I'm up to.
Sophie Ellis-Bextor
#88. To successfully gain a hostage's safe release, a negotiator had to penetrate the hostage-taker's motives, state of mind, intelligence, and emotional strengths and weaknesses. The negotiator played the role of bully, conciliator, enforcer, savior, confessor, instigator, and
Chris Voss
#89. A relationship with Christ changes your heart. It's not about your head. It changes your heart. Jesus comes to live in your heart, and even if a person does good works, but they do them without Christ, most of the time, their motives are wrong for why they do them.
Joyce Meyer
#90. Necessity may not be the opposite of freedom, and perhaps a man is most free when, instead of producing motives, he could only say, I am what I do.
C.S. Lewis
#91. Politics of all sorts, I confess, are far beyond my limited powers of comprehension. Those of this country as far as I have been able to observe, resolve themselves into two great motives. The aristocratic desire of elevation and separation, and the democratic desire of demolishing and levelling.
Fanny Kemble
#92. When we all stand before the judgment seat of Christ, we will have our true motives revealed.
Billy Graham
#93. The pains of disconcerted or frustrated habits, and the inherent pleasure there is in following them, are motives which nature has put into our wills without generally caring to inform us why; and she sometimes decrees, indeed, that her reasons shall not be ours.
Chauncey Wright
#94. Dogs are blameless, devoid of calculation, neither blessed nor cursed with human motives. They can't really be held responsible for what they do. But we can."
--from The Dogs of Bedlam Farm
Jon Katz
#95. Commitment is a word invented in our abstract modernity to signify the absence of any real motives in the soul for moral dedication.
Allan Bloom
#96. True repentance relinquishes self-centeredness and selfish motives. True repentance leads us to want to be Spirit-led and to live solely for the glory of God, no matter the consequences.
Susan Brackley
#97. Getting down to the nitty-gritty, most people are motivated by unconscious motives most of the time.
Richard J. Mayer
#98. This was something he certainly had not done. I thought he might be toying, some cat-and-mouse routine, but now I think that his motives and desires weren't obvious even to him. They had not yet reached the level of words.
Margaret Atwood
#99. 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
#100. There seems to be a kind of order in the universe ... in the movement of the stars and the turning of the Earth and the changing of the seasons. But human life is almost pure chaos. Everyone takes his stance, asserts his own right and feelings, mistaking the motives of others, and his own.
Katherine Anne Porter
