Top 94 Our Motives Quotes
#1. 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
#2. 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
#3. Until we see ourselves from the outside objectively, we will automatically project our motives on other people.
Stephen R. Covey
#4. Even if our motives are presently misunderstood. We will reach the goal of freedom in Birmingham and all over the nation, because the goal of America is freedom.
Martin Luther King Jr.
#5. But if we never acted except when we were certain our motives were pure, we would never act at all.
C.J. Sansom
#6. How each of us comes for our own reasons." "Comes where?" "To be with them and listen to their message. What Stephen meant was that our motives are wrong. Our thinking is wrong. But if we come . . . with an open heart and mind, we will see the rightness of their declarations.
Janette Oke
#8. Is not everything that we consider important our betrayer ? It shows where our motives lie, and where our motives are altogether lacking.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#9. You see, my dear, when people are angry with us, it is because they think we have done something to hurt them. Often, as it turns out, they have misjudged us or our motives. Thus, anger becomes a selfish emotion.
Carolynn Carey
#10. So long as we need to control other people, however benign our motives, we are captive to that need. In giving them freedom, we free ourselves.
Marilyn Ferguson
#11. Holiness has to do with more than mere acts. Our motives must be holy, that is, arising from a desire to do something simply because it is the will of God. Our thoughts should be holy, since they are known to God even before they are formed in our minds.
Jerry Bridges
#12. One principle I've been fighting for that doesn't endear me to a lot of people is that black people can be just as complicated and screwed up as white people. Our motives can be just as base and violent. Suffering does not necessarily ennoble you.
Henry Louis Gates
#13. I really believe that 'Saw' makes us stop and think and question our motives and what we're doing here on Earth.
Betsy Russell
#14. We make a great fuss about national conscience, but it consists mainly in insisting upon everyone ascribing our national policy to highly moral motives, rather than in examining what our motives really are.
Joan Robinson
#15. 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
#16. The thirst for education that comes with the change the gospel brings can be a blessing or a curse, depending on our motives.
Henry B. Eyring
#17. Our motives are useless if we don't start acting it out
Sunday Adelaja
#18. If you run on lies long enough, they become your truth.
Such delicate fabric we conceal our motives in.
Colors to obscure the truth of our hearts.
No one is a bad person in his or her own mind.
We are all noble protagonists.
Rick Remender
#19. Self-awareness is our capacity to stand apart from ourselves and examine our thinking, our motives, our history, our scripts, our actions, and our habits and tendencies.
Stephen Covey
#20. How many times do we lose an occasion for soul work by leaping ahead to final solutions without pausing to savor the undertones? We are a radically bottom-line society, eager to act and to end tension, and thus we lose opportunities to know ourselves for our motives and our secrets.
Thomas Moore
#21. At the core, our motives are always self-serving, Kate. Altruism is a fog created by sly minds seeking to benefit from the energy and skill of others. Nothing more.
Ilona Andrews
#22. We human beings often see only what is before our eyes. But God in His infinite justice searches the heart and our secret motives and manifests accordingly to us His mercy.
Robert K. Massie
#23. The first steps toward stewardship are awareness, appreciation, and the
selfish desire to have the things around for our kids to see. Presumably the
unselfish motives will follow as we wise up.
Barbara Kingsolver
#24. Ought we not to love dearly the neighbor, who truly represents to us the sacred Person of our Master? And is this not one of the most powerful motives we could have for loving each other with an ardently burning love?
Francis De Sales
#25. Nothing would prove more disastrous to our ideas, we contended, than to neglect the effect of the internal upon the external, of the psychological motives and needs upon existing institutions.
Emma Goldman
#26. Evolutionary psychologists seem to want to unmask our noblest motives as ultimately self-interested - to show that our love for children, compassion for the unfortunate and sense of justice are just tactics in a Darwinian struggle to perpetuate our genes.
Steven Pinker
#27. How working for the wrong motives poisons our creativity and warps our ideas of success and failure.
Ray Bradbury
#28. Honesty has a beautiful and refreshing simplicity about it. No ulterior motives. No hidden meanings. An absence of hypocrisy, duplicity, political games, and verbal superficiality. As honesty and real integrity characterize our lives, there will be no need to manipulate others.
Charles R. Swindoll
#29. A congeries of motives prevents us from blowing up our spinning mills and reviving the distaff. Gandhi had a try at this sort of revolution: he was as simple-minded as a child trying to empty the sea on to the sand with the aid of a tea-cup.
Antoine De Saint-Exupery
#30. We will be judged according to the secret motives and the character of our work. If we have done our work for selfish motives or personal gain, even if the results looked noble to our friends and family, God knows our hearts.
Billy Graham
#31. 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
#32. Through our intentions, a place no power can influence, we have the power to oppose.
Bryant McGill
#33. There may be in every government a few choice spirits, who may act from more worthy motives. One great error is that we suppose mankind more honest than they are. Our prevailing passions are ambition and interest ...
Alexander Hamilton
#34. Our body remains alive, yet sooner or later our soul will receive a mortal blow. The perfect crime
for we don't know who murdered our joy, what their motives were, or where the guilty parties are to be found.
Paulo Coelho
#35. So our building of the visible Church becomes much like any natural business function, using natural means and natural motives.
Francis Schaeffer
#36. None of our hearts are pure, we always have mixed motives.
Are self deceivers, but the worst of all
Deceits is to murmur 'Lord, I am not worthy'
And, lying easy, turn your face to the wall.
Louis MacNeice
#37. No true love is possible, Lewis demonstrates, until we abandon our claims, our rights, our grievances. Until then we will be trapped in the obscurity of our heart's mixed motives, our will to possess, to control, to be our own gods.
Michael D. O'Brien
#39. We must understand the motives and forces of our time and analyze their structure from three points of view: the material, the functional, and the spiritual. We must make clear in what respects our epoch differs from others and in what respects it is similar.
Ludwig Mies Van Der Rohe
#40. 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
#41. 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
#42. We usually judge people by our own reactions fears, and desires. We do not see them as separate people . . . but as part of ourselves and our lives. We attribute to them motives which we would have in the same circumstances.
Caryll Houselander
#43. 409. - We should often be ashamed of our very best actions if the world only saw the motives which caused them.
Francois De La Rochefoucauld
#44. 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
#45. From whichsoever of these motives it might be, true it is, that many of them came over to our religion, and were initiated into it by baptism.
Thomas More
#46. We would be ashamed of our best behavior if the people knew the motives of our behaving so.
Victor Hugo
#47. 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
#48. Integrity largely has to do with purifying our intentions and a growing honesty about our actual motives.
Richard Rohr
#49. The motives to actions and the inward turns of mind seem in our opinion more necessary to be known than the actions themselves; and much rather would we choose that our reader should clearly understand what our principal actors think than what they do.
Sarah Fielding
#50. My mind mends my motives and my notion navigates my natives,for we all are made of soil-our corrupted soil.
Munia Khan
#51. 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
#53. We are all very good at rationalizing our actions so that they are in line with our selfish motives.
Dan Ariely
#54. The greater part of our daily actions are the result of hidden motives which escape our observation.
Gustave Le Bon
#55. Our souls may lose their peace and even disturb other people's, if we are always criticizing trivial actions - which often are not real defects at all, but we construe them wrongly through our ignorance of their motives.
Saint Teresa Of Avila
#56. Many of our deepest motives come, not from an adult logic of how things work in the world, but out of something that is frozen from childhood.
Kazuo Ishiguro
#57. By creating instinctively in auto mode we can uncover our true motives, our creative drive.
David Luiz
#58. 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
#59. 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
#60. When we all stand before the judgment seat of Christ, we will have our true motives revealed.
Billy Graham
#61. 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
#62. 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
#63. 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
#64. Ready are we all to cry out and ascribe motives when our toes are pinched.
Abraham Lincoln
#65. What we believe to be the motives of our conduct are usually but the pretexts for it.
Miguel De Unamuno
#66. We should often blush for our very best actions, if the world did but see all the motives upon which they were done.
Francois De La Rochefoucauld
#67. 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
#68. In general, we do well to let an opponent's motives alone. We are seldom just to them. Our own motives on such occasions are often worse than those we assail.
William Ellery Channing
#69. 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
#70. 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
#71. When our brain feels too weak to deal with our opponent's objections, our heart answers by casting suspicion on their underlying motives.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#72. 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
#73. 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
#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. 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
#76. 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
#77. The woman who is liberated must never cross the line in which we ask men to examine their actions; we are a country built on the ideas, ingenuity, canniness, and downright brutality of man - to question their motives is to question our existence.
Kristen Kehoe
#78. Finding this, she was much perplexed as to Henchard's motives in opening the matter at all; for in such cases we attribute to an enemy a power of consistent action which we never find in ourselves or or in our friends ...
Thomas Hardy
#79. People will have their excitements, and a good rousing persecution used to stir things like the burning of Chicago or a Presidential election in our day.
E.P. Roe
#80. Our monsters walk the dark pathways of secret motives ...
John Geddes
#81. Whenever we want to combat our enemies, first and foremost we must start by understanding them rather than exaggerating their motives.
Criss Jami
#82. We think we have some kind of privileged access to our own motives and intentions. In fact we have no clear insight into what moves us to live as we do. The stories we tell ourselves are like the messages that appear on Ouija boards. If we are authors of our lives, it is only in retrospect.
John N. Gray
#83. I do think that sometimes you can invent more palatable or digestible reasons versions or reasons, when perhaps you don't want to admit the truth to yourself, and sometimes we deceive ourselves - along with others - about our reasons and motives.
Adam Brody
#84. Doubt is a disease that infects the mind creating a mistrust of peoples motives and ones own perceptions. Doubt has the ability to call into questions everything you ever believed about someone and reinforce the darkest suspicions of our inner circle.
Emily Thorne
#85. If your motives aren't clean, money itself becomes evil. But When we don't have money enough evil, the world tells us we're losers. So what determines our place in society is not how much kindness is in our hearts but how much evil is in our wallet.
Todd McFarlane
#86. The motives even of our best actions will not always bear examination.
Charlotte Lennox
#87. 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
#88. Animated by Christian motives and directed to Christian ends, it shall in no wise go unrewarded: here, by the testimony of an approving conscience; hereafter, by the benediction of our blessed Redeemer, and a brighter inheritance his Father's house.
Richard Mant
#89. One of the things I found is that the things we want to say for well-intentioned motives often cause more harm than good. People don't need our words. They mainly need our presence, they need our love. And if you come in too quickly with explanations, you may do more harm than good.
Philip Yancey
#90. The Bible is not a tool for sharpening our religious competence, but a living and active sword for cleaving our double-minded thoughts and motives, exposing and transforming the contents of our hearts.
Richard J. Foster
#91. If efforts to do social work are couched in selfish motives, then they will die a premature death. Why would my efforts get politicised? I have values I inherited from my father. He helped many. Anyone, even a postman knocking on our door would get a glass of water and some sweets.
Sachin Tendulkar
#92. We should often feel ashamed of our best actions if the world could see all the motives which produced them.
Francois De La Rochefoucauld
#93. 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
#94. 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
