Top 100 Quotes About Motivations
#1. I don't do villains often enough. There are two approaches: give them sympathetic, reasonable motivations for doing the most unspeakable things, or get inside heads that are interestingly broken.
Charles Stross
#2. Are there people to aspire to? Can people be strong enough to withstand all of this disillusionment? Maybe the time is right for people to emerge from the easy cynicism and try to get back to a place where we can actually believe in people and trust people to have proper motivations.
Brendan Gleeson
#3. I don't think most people are all heroic or all villainous, so I find ambiguity of motivations to be a natural human condition.
Ann Nocenti
#4. On some occasions the only people making accurate claims about the motivations of Islamists and jihadists are themselves dangerous bigots. That's terrifying.
Sam Harris
#5. The second thing for me, probably a few clicks down, is the idea that The Sims smoothly age and have different concerns and motivations and needs at different age ranges.
Will Wright
#6. Characters are supposed to have understandable motivations. The reader is supposed to be able to relate to them.
Aaron Starmer
#7. Other people's deconstruction of your motivations doesn't help you do what you do. You can't swallow and think about swallowing at the same time.
Stephen Colbert
#8. In a story you had to find a reason, but real life gets on very well without even Freudian motivations.
Anthony Burgess
#9. The pavilion that seems to intercept divine aid does not cover God but occasionally covers us. God is never hidden, yet sometimes we are, covered by a pavilion of motivations that draw us away from God and make Him seem distant and inaccessible.
Henry B. Eyring
#10. I think that's the real horror story for me, how little you can ever really know about your own motivations. How in the dark we all are about the concerns and the contents of our minds.
Karen Russell
#11. One of my motivations to become a blood specialist was to study malaria in red blood cells. But in science, you discover something and you want to go this way, but your work goes that way.
Peter Agre
#12. By focusing on positive, healthy motivations and letting the more negative ones pass, you can purify the source of you imaginative power.
Denis Waitley
#13. When kids are young, before the age of ten, there is a critical window of opportunity when their habits and motivations can be influenced.
Richard Attias
#14. A scientifically verifiable theory of morals must be rooted in the individual's instinct to survive - and nowhere else! - and must correctly describe the hierarchy of survival, note the motivations at each level, and resolve all conflicts.
Robert A. Heinlein
#15. There's a chilling grimness behind his gaze, and I let myself acknowledge what I've been denying: In his own way, Morpheus is my knight, too. He just has more muddled motivations than Jeb - not always unselfish and honorable, but vigilant. I have to give him that.
-Unhinged, pg 252
A.G. Howard
#16. [The movies] make the sort of comment only a novel can make, an allusion to the world in which people live, the psychological and economic motivations, the influences of the period in which they lived.
Orson Welles
#17. Often, writer's block will occur when I don't understand a character or his/her motivations. So I will make notes analysing characters.
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
#18. If everyone waited to do something good until they had purely unselfish motivations, no good would ever get done in the world. The point is to do it anyway.
Wendy Mass
#19. World is full of people so troubled they don't even understand themselves. You could offer them a thousand dollars to explain their motivations, but they can't tell you what they don't know.
Catherine Ryan Hyde
#20. What could have John Edwards' motivations been to have the affair with Rielle Hunter, given his wife is smarter than he is and probably nagging him a lot about doing this, and he found somebody that did something with her mouth other than talk.
Rush Limbaugh
#21. The idea that the law should punish what is rude; that government should protect our tender sensibilities from those who would - quite often with shallow motivations but sometimes with deeper and more serious complaints - challenge our national certainties and rituals, should alarm and anger us.
Nick Harkaway
#22. Think through the well-meaning motivations of both your Dictator and your Wild Child, until you really understand that within their limited perspectives they're doing their very best. Then offer them both kindness.
Martha N. Beck
#23. I knew my motivations for going to each place and what I was looking for. If I don't do that then I generally don't write about my travels.
Jessa Crispin
#24. But to fight something, you really have to try to understand its motivations - particularly when the something you're fighting holds most of the cards, the deck is stacked against you, and the whole gambling hall is on fire and filled with thugs.
Greg Bear
#25. Examining other people's motivations, other people's language and other people's way of interacting is much more fascinating to me than spending a lot of time worrying about my own. I've said, 'What other people think of me is none of my business.'
Beth Broderick
#26. [R]elying on nonfinancial motivations may actually make systems more tolerant of variable participation.
Clay Shirky
#27. Why I love chess and tennis - the volleying aspect, and the fact that your competitors' reactions and motivations and bluffs come into the game itself.
Christopher Bollen
#28. Bureaucrats behave very differently than a private-sector manager because their motivations are different. Permanent bureaucrats, no matter how senior, worry about their next job.
John Sununu
#29. Who we are is the result of how we live and act on a daily basis. Our daily actions reflect our prime values and motivations.
David Frawley
#30. You have to think an awful lot about your motivations or people's behavioral intentions or what their body language can indicate or what's really going on or what makes people sometimes do, sometimes, the irrational things they do.
Ron Silver
#31. People are different, writers are different, and the motivations can come from anywhere.
Brian Lageose
#32. [He] had insisted that inanimate objects couldn't have malignant motivations, but Emma had extensive proof to the contrary.
Lauren Willig
#33. A single action could derive from many motivations. I should never assume.
Rachel Hartman
#34. The second draft is on yellow paper, that's when I work on characterizations. The third is pink, I work on story motivations. Then blue, that's where I cut, cut, cut.
Jacqueline Susann
#35. Love must be chosen. It must be free, and it must be from the heart, without external motivations. But, quite frankly, it's very difficult for an all-powerful God to behave in such a way that love can occur with these qualities.
Gregory A. Boyd
#36. What might have happened to them to make them the way they were? It did not change what they now did, but it changed, profoundly, how he perceived their motivations, their place in the world.
Sherwood Smith
#37. what is the truth about the inner motivations, character, and ambition of those who hold power?
Stephen R. Covey
#38. We may not always know exactly why we do what we do, choose what we choose, or feel what we feel. But the obscurity of our real motivations doesn't stop us from creating perfectly logical-sounding reasons for our actions, decisions, and feelings.
Dan Ariely
#39. Always questioning your motivations is a healthy thing, but fearing your capacity for doing the wrong thing so that you retreat from many aspects of life is a terrible error in itself.
Dean Koontz
#40. If you can spend enough time playing other people, you don't have to think too much about your own character motivations.
Dean Koontz
#41. There are cultural biases built into testing, and that was one of the motivations for the concept of affirmative action - to try to balance out those effects.
Sonia Sotomayor
#42. I believe fervently in the nature, in truth and imagination, I believe in the blood, in life, words, and motivations.
Gael Garcia Bernal
#43. The reason that war is such a fascinating subject for writers is because it's a revealer. Put a bunch of people in an adrenaline-fuelled, life-or-death situation and their fundamental behaviours are exposed, the scrim is taken away and the motivations behind each personality come out to play.
Sloane Crosley
#44. Uncomplicated men assumed others to have uncomplicated motivations,
Robert Jordan
#45. You have to understand who your customer is and her motivations and marry it to what's happening in the outside world.
Mindy Grossman
#46. I feel bad about my deeper, underlying reasons for judging people with children. I judge them as a defense mechanism, because I am sad about my motivations for not having kids. I am self-centered and dysmorphic with low self-esteem.
Melissa Broder
#47. We are different personality types with different needs and motivations. In our culture, different is scary. Extroverts have laid claim on the definition of normal, leaving introverts to feel guilty for not fitting in. While
Michaela Chung
#48. Praise and reward create a system of extrinsic motivations for behavior. Children (and adults) end up taking action in order to receive the praise or rewards.
Marshall B. Rosenberg
#49. Thucydides had grasped that vital historical insight that groups of people behave differently and have different motivations from individual human beings, and that they often behave far more discreditably than individuals. He
Diarmaid MacCulloch
#50. When I read profiles of myself, I sometimes think: 'I have spent my whole life struggling to understand my motivations and impulses, and I've never quite sorted them out.'
Michael Palin
#51. Philosophy is thinking in slow motion. It breaks down, describes and assesses moves we ordinarily make at great speed - to do with our natural motivations and beliefs. It then becomes evident that alternatives are possible.
John Campbell
#52. Keep purifying your motivations so that they're completely about love and service to elevate the energy and experiences even further.
Doreen Virtue
#53. One of the biggest motivations for me with writing my books is to offer girls some escapism, especially girls who really need it, like I did.
Meg Cabot
#54. In revision, your imagination becomes deeply engaged with your material. It's when you come to know your characters and begin to perceive their motivations and values.
John Dufresne
#55. I draw comfort from the notion that nature reveals its motivations only slowly; mysteries within mysteries that keep us arrogant, would-be know-alls firmly in our place.
John Lister-Kaye
#56. The main motivations were to try to leverage Google's expertise with large computer systems and to try to give something back to science
Susan Wojcicki
#57. Sometimes our motivations can be quite hazy, contradictory and multi-faceted, in real life.
Adam Rayner
#58. There are people in need of help. Charity is one of the nobler human motivations. The act of reaching into one's own pockets to help a fellow man in need is praiseworthy and laudable. Reaching into someone else's pocket is despicable and worthy of condemnation.
Walter E. Williams
#59. Making judgements about other people requires that we understand where they are coming from;their motivations and their fears. Only then can we claim to know them.
Caroline Adhiambo Jakob
#60. I have known men who could see through the motivations of others with the skill of a clairvoyant; only to prove blind to their own mistakes. I have been one of those men.
Bernard Baruch
#61. I don't think immortality is necessarily the key to understanding the world. You have to be careful with what you think you're achieving. I'm all for science discovering amazing and fantastic things about our world, but I think the motivations behind it are slightly askew.
Reggie Watts
#62. We certainly strive for reality in terms of asking our audience to believe the motivations, reactions, and behavior of our characters, but do I know when Veronica has time to do her homework? Not really.
Rob Thomas
#63. Leaders are made, not born. You learn to become a leader by doing what other excellent leaders have done before you. You become proficient in your job or skill, and then you become proficient at understanding the motivations and behaviors of other people.
Brian Tracy
#64. My great-grandfather and his two brothers fought at Gettysburg. They were in artillery, and they survived the war, thank goodness. So I revere what they did. I think their motivations were honorable when they undertook the war and participated in it along with other Southerners.
Jimmy Carter
#65. Those who believe in climate change, as I do, I think it's also fair to say that they are more receptive to confirming evidence than disconfirming evidence. They happen to be right, but their motivations are in play also.
Cass Sunstein
#66. All who act upon their highest motivations become a power for good. Know that every right thing you do - every good word you say - every positive thought you think - has a good effect.
Peace Pilgrim
#67. Self-esteem and identity are very fragile things. I think a lot of times, those are the motivations for why people do take their own lives - not being seen, not being recognized, not being loved, not feeling supported, not feeling understood.
Nate Parker
#68. The characters act for reasons that they can't control and, as readers, we have to believe in their motivations, their sense of choice and in the reality of their suffering, even though, deep down, we know it's all just puppetry on the part of the writer.
Johnny Rich
#69. I aim to be translucent, so you don't notice the words, just their meaning. I haven't much insight into people's motivations.
Ken Follett
#70. No society can long sustain itself unless its members have learned the sensitivities, motivations and skills involved in assisting and caring for other human beings.
Urie Bronfenbrenner
#71. Understand your enemy, his strengths, his weaknesses, and, most of all, his motivations.
M.A. Richards
#72. How immense God is, that He is able to sweep into His purposes even foolish requests and bad motivations.
Alistair Begg
#73. I am puzzled by people today who, after moralizing about the need for cooperation and goodwill and love-thy-neighbor-as-thyself, suddenly invoke the most primitive, barbarous motivations for any kind of progress.
Murray Bookchin
#74. The motivations of a scientist are always mixed and complex ... every medical student has the desire to do good in the world. Making a small contribution to that effort is really in a sense the last significant thing that I want to do with my life.
Gustav Nossal
#75. If you're dealing with a character that actually exists, there's an awful lot of information there. So, you can put together, from the information, motivations, insecurities, reactions. Where does that seed get born, if you like? What I do is put that together.
Michael Fassbender
#76. The motivations of kings in British history can generally be reduced to two: the quest for territory and the search for a male heir. No king was secure on his throne until he had a son, and no queen consort was ever really safe without a boy.
Kate Williams
#77. One of the central motivations for holiness in the New Testament is to be who you are, to understand your identity and your union in Christ and to live that way.
Kevin DeYoung
#78. I admitted that I did not understand life. What I meant was that I am bewildered by human hearts and motivations, including my own.
Norman Lock
#79. Similarly the animal psychologist, Aristophanes, accidentally discovered the world's first joke while inquiring into the hitherto mysterious motivations of pathway-traversing fowl.
George Pendle
#80. Much of our time is spent just maintaining our emotional lives and physical conditions. To move ahead, we often have to clear a trail as we go. Progress and development do not occur without change in our motivations and actions.
James H. Bae
#81. In many ways, I'm a big admirer still of Julian Assange. He had balls to do what he did and his motivations in terms of holding the powerful to account are tremendously inspiring to me.
Alex Gibney
#82. Sometimes as you work, you find that you are learning things about your own perceptions and motivations that are way below you consciousness. If you get lucky, you recognize what you are doing, but all too often we don't find the connection between our work and our own motivations.
Jay Maisel
#83. Social motivations can drive far more participation than personal motivation alone
Clay Shirky
#84. Do you create anything, or just criticize others work and belittle their motivations?
Steve Jobs
#85. There are certain jobs I don't take because I feel no connection to the person. But if somebody is open with me, and honest about their motivations, and has some level of self- awareness, then I'm going to understand them.
Hilary Liftin
#86. In American films, Russians are often portrayed like cartoon villains without clear motivations.
Yuliya Snigir
#87. Self-interest and rational calculation can thus look like common sense, but there are other ways of understanding human motivations.
Derek Wall
#88. Every runner has a specific motivation and inspiration for running a marathon. This year, all 36,000 of us will 'run together' to demonstrate the spirit of the marathon. We will still have our individual motivations, but we will be unified under the Boston Strong umbrella.
Meb Keflezighi
#89. Sometimes you have to protect the life of the play. It seems like spelling out mysterious, musical details can destroy a play by making the motivations too clear, too simplex.
John Guare
#90. Democratically-oriented Jeffersonian inspiration has prevailed throughout history and certainly been more admired than capitalistic Hamiltonian-style motivations of greed and power.
Patrick Mendis
#91. The journey of consciousness, of mysticism, is to come to know yourself and your own motivations.
Caroline Myss
#92. Vengeance is the cheapest of motivations, it's a tin star on a shabby coat. I want answers is all that I want.
Ben H. Winters
#93. What I find most interesting is how people really have taken Linux and used it in ways and attributes and motivations that I never felt.
Linus Torvalds
#94. I've written short stories from male perspectives before, and I've never had a problem with it as long as I've understood the character's emotions and motivations.
Sara Shepard
#95. One of the primary motivations for the series is that I never really felt that I was a person who could explain verbally what I thought all that well.
Lev Yilmaz
#96. We have today a fairly thorough knowledge of the early Greco-Roman period because our motivations are the same.
Arthur Erickson
#97. The only lifelong, reliable motivations are those that come from within, and one of the strongest of those is the joy and pride that grow from knowing that you've just done something as well as you can do it.
Lloyd Dobyns
#98. Whatever their motivations, lawmakers on both side of the aisle have certainly discovered that immigration is one of those issues that resonate strongly with the public.
Gwen Ifill
#100. When you get up in the morning, set your motivations.
Richard Gere
