Top 100 Motives Of Quotes
#1. 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
#2. 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
#3. 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
#4. 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
#5. 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
#6. 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
#7. 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
#8. 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
#9. 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
#10. 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
#11. 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
#12. 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
#14. 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
#15. 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
#16. What we believe to be the motives of our conduct are usually but the pretexts for it.
Miguel De Unamuno
#17. 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
#19. It is the misfortune of all miscellaneous political combinations, that with the purest motives of their more generous members are ever mixed the most sordid interests and the fiercest passions of mean confedes.
Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton
#20. The motives of these parents vary, many parents don't like the curriculum being taught to their kids, or are wary of the threat of peer pressure or the presence of drugs or violence lurking in too many of our schools today.
Ernest Istook
#21. When the motives of artists are profound, when they are at their work as a result of deep consideration, when they believe in the importance of what they are doing, their work creates a stir in the world.
Robert Henri
#22. You have no assurance that they are doing wrong at all, for the motives of man's actions are not always what they seem. There is generally much to learn before any judgement can be pronounced with certainty on another's doings.
Marcus Aurelius
#23. If you live among dogs they'll think you've the motives of a dog.
Ford Madox Ford
#24. One of the chief motives of artistic creation is certainly the need of feeling that we are essential in relationship to the world.
Jean-Paul Sartre
#25. Growing up means learning to dig beneath surface behavior and discern the true motives of others, and to respond to intent, not behavior.
Ramon Stevens
#26. Angus ... had hitherto maintained hilarious ease from motives of mental hygiene ...
G.K. Chesterton
#27. A moral being is one who is capable of reflecting on his past actions and their motives - of approving of some and disapproving of others.
Charles Darwin
#28. The probability that we face global warming caused by fossil fuels is now so overwhelming that it is legitimate to doubt the motives of those who deny it
Adair Turner
#29. Just as she kept her thoughts to herself, I was learning to do the same. This was what growing up was about: HIDE the corpse, DON'T bare your heart, DO make assumptions about the motives of others.
Abraham Verghese
#30. As much as she was capable at deciphering the motives of others, she was dreadful at doing the same for herself.
Eric Rickstad
#31. He who has conferred a benefit on anyone from motives of love or honor will feel pain, if he sees that the benefit is received without gratitude.
Aristotle.
#32. There's no way to know the motives of another person totally, even a person that you know very well.
Carl Bernstein
#33. He is guilty, but he will be acquitted, from motives of humanity, in accordance with the new ideas, the new sentiments that had come into fashion,
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#34. Discernment is the son of good judgment and the father of self-control. When mixed with an already clear conscience, the ability to read the true motives of a critic keeps one's conscience both clear and at ease.
Criss Jami
#35. In the rare cases where it occurs, a failure to increase one's visible consumption when the means for an increase are at hand is felt in popular apprehension to call for explanation, and unworthy motives of miserliness are imputed.
Thorstein Veblen
#36. Criticism discloses that which it would fain conceal, but conceals that which it professes to disclose; it is therefore, read by the discerning, not to discover the merits of an author, but the motives of his critic.
Charles Caleb Colton
#37. society pays great attention to the motives of dissenters, but none to those who submit to our institutions, either by ensuring that their actions remain concealed or by using any other means. Obedience to authority is implicitly deemed the natural state. In
Glenn Greenwald
#38. The motives of the writer form as important an ingredient in the analysis or his history, as the facts he records. Probability is a powerful and troublesome test; and it is by this troublesome standard that a large portion of historical evidence is sifted.
Homer
#39. So many books that have Christian characters but are written by atheists mercilessly pillory and mock and question the motives of people with faith. I'm past all that.
Michel Faber
#40. The desire of posthumous fame and the dread of posthumous reproach and execration are feelings from the influence of which scarcely any man is perfectly free, and which in many men are powerful and constant motives of action.
Thomas B. Macaulay
#41. The ability to discern the thoughts and motives of your heart (especially when experiencing intense emotion) is an essential skill for the believer. Recognizing thoughts and imaginations of the heart is a prerequisite of bringing them 'captive to the obedience of Christ'.
Lou Priolo
#42. This was what growing up was about: hide the corpse, don't bare your heart, do make assumptions about the motives of others. They're certainly doing all these things to you.
Abraham Verghese
#43. But I have the satisfaction, at the same time, to reflect that the impression to be made depends upon the consistency of the charge and the motives of the prosecutors.
Robert Walpole
#44. If certain individuals fall in love from motives of convenience, they can be contrasted with plenty of others in whom passion seems principally aroused by the intensity of administrative difficulties in procuring its satisfaction.
Anthony Powell
#45. A man must learn to understand the motives of human beings, their illusions, and their sufferings.
Albert Einstein
#46. The fear of punishment may be necessary to the suppression of vice; but it also suspends the finer motives of virtue.
William Hazlitt
#47. When you constantly question the motives of others you can't see them in their truest form.
Jayce O'Neal
#48. With constant practice, one can improve his physical body and mental attitude rapidly, thereby igniting the higher motives of making one's self useful to himself and all mankind.
Dharma Mittra
#49. In 1930s mysteries, all sorts of motives were credible which aren't credible today, especially motives of preventing guilty sexual secrets from coming out. Nowadays, people sell their guilty sexual secrets.
P.D. James
#51. I pulled myself up and told myself to stop these ridiculous thoughts, wondering why it is that we can never stop trying to analyse the motives of people who have no personal interest in us, in the vain hope of finding that perhaps they may have just a little after all.
Barbara Pym
#52. People do not always understand the motives of sublime conduct, and when they are astonished they are very apt to think they ought to be alarmed. The truth is none are fit judges of greatness but those who are capable of it.
Jane Porter
#53. It is for the reader to see in the book the nature of the motives of human actions and perhaps learn something too of the motives behind the social forces which judge those actions and which, I take it, we call a system of morality.
Anthony Burgess
#54. Men's minds are as variant as their faces. Where the motives of their actions are pure, the operation of the former is no more to be imputed to them as a crime, than the appearance of the latter; for both, being the work of nature, are alike unavoidable.
George Washington
#55. By studying our history and focusing on the motives of the elite, we can draw an image of what our future might look like, and if we stay on the current path that we are on, the future looks very grim.
Joseph P. Kauffman
#56. It's hard enough judging the motives of people who live in our own times, let alone the motives of those who've been dead three hundred years. They can't come back and tell us, can they?
Susanna Kearsley
#57. It is more important to understand the ground of your own behavior than to understand the motives of another.
Dag Hammarskjold
#58. 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.
Charles Caleb Colton
#59. We would be ashamed of our best behavior if the people knew the motives of our behaving so.
Victor Hugo
#60. motives of people, she was inclined to credit any extraordinary happening attributed to the whimsical perambulations of the buried. The desperate squeakings about the old house on
F Scott Fitzgerald
#61. Naturally, it is a terrible, despicable crime when, as in Munich, people are taken hostage, people are killed. But probing the motives of those responsible and showing that they are also individuals with families and have their own story does not excuse what they did.
Steven Spielberg
#62. I have always examined closely the motives of any group for which I am asked to raise money.
Kate Smith
#63. If we understand the mechanism and motives of the group mind, it is now possible to control and regiment the masses according to our will without them knowing it.
Edward Bernays
#64. Has there ever been a more revealing moment this year? Let me just put this in fairly simple terms: Al Jazeera now broadcasts the words of Senator Durbin to the Mideast, certainly putting our troops in greater danger. No more needs to be said about the motives of liberals.
Karl Rove
#65. Of all the joyous motives of school life, the love of knowledge is the only abiding one; the only one which determines the scale, so to speak, upon which the person will hereafter live.
Charlotte Mason
#66. 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
#67. 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
#68. 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
#69. 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
#70. 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
#71. 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
#72. 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
#73. 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
#74. 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
#75. 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
#76. 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
#77. 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
#78. 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
#79. 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
#80. I'm realising my dream of owning a top football club. Some will doubt my motives, others will think I'm crazy.
Roman Abramovich
#81. 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
#82. 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
#83. 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
#84. 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
#85. 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
#86. 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
#87. 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
#88. Every soul is a soul. It is the motives, deeds and actions that define the personality of each soul.
Lailah Gifty Akita
#89. 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
#90. 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
#91. 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
#92. 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
#93. 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
#94. 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
#95. 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
#96. 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
#97. 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
#98. Even truth becomes just another weapon of division and violence, when shared with impure motives and a defiled heart.
Hope D. Blackwell
#99. 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
#100. Never go to another woman about your woman. Not unless you want an insidious form of advice.
Donna Lynn Hope
