Top 100 Quotes About Motives
#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. Whenever a man does a thoroughly stupid thing, it is always from the noblest motives.
Oscar Wilde
#5. We love from little motives, not for large reasons.
Ellen Glasgow
#6. 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
#7. 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
#8. 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
#9. 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
#10. You have to give everyone ugly motives for everything they do, because ugly motives are all you understand.
Cassandra Clare
#11. 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
#12. Whatever I may do to serve you will be prompted solely from selfish motives, since it gives me more pleasure to serve you than not.
Edgar Rice Burroughs
#13. Man is a deeply illogical being, and must be ruled illogically. Whatever that frigid prig Bentham may say, there are innumerable motives that have nothing to do with utility.
Patrick O'Brian
#14. 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
#15. 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
#16. 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
#17. If you give to get something, you're not giving, you're trading. Your motives are second in importance only to your actions
Jose Silva Jr.
#18. 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
#19. Never question another man's motive. His wisdom, yes, but not his motives.
Dwight D. Eisenhower
#20. 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
#21. 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
#22. 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
#23. 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
#24. 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
#25. His first - and worst - mistake was blindly doing what he was told to do. Without questioning their methods or their motives, he allowed politicians to make the decisions that led to his early demise.
Tom Robbins
#26. 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
#27. Criticism always seemed to me a lot like police work. You look for clues, fingerprints, motives. You need to construct an airtight case.
Nathaniel Rich
#28. I'm realising my dream of owning a top football club. Some will doubt my motives, others will think I'm crazy.
Roman Abramovich
#29. 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
#30. 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
#31. 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
#32. 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
#33. 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
#35. 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
#36. 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
#37. 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
#38. 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
#39. 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
#40. Every soul is a soul. It is the motives, deeds and actions that define the personality of each soul.
Lailah Gifty Akita
#41. Sacrifice' was often a cloak for many actions that did not always stem from the highest motives.
Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit
#42. 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
#43. 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
#44. 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
#45. 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
#46. 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
#47. 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
#48. I was vaguely aware that people used to hijack planes to Cuba. But I didn't know much about how often it happened and what the motives were. I started looking into what was going on back then, and I was blown away by how common hijacking once was.
Brendan I. Koerner
#49. 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
#50. 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
#51. I learned then that practically no one in the world is entirely bad or entirely good, and that motives are often more important than actions.
Eleanor Roosevelt
#52. 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
#53. 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
#54. 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
#55. See a person's means ... Observe his motives. Examine that in which he rests. How can a person conceal his character?
Confucius
#56. 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
#57. Generosity is a willingness to give, to open without philosophical or pious or religious motives, just simply doing what is required at any moment in any situation, not being afraid to receive anything.
Chogyam Trungpa
#58. Good motives butter no parsnips, and hell is paved with buttered parsnips.
Irvin S. Cobb
#59. Even truth becomes just another weapon of division and violence, when shared with impure motives and a defiled heart.
Hope D. Blackwell
#60. 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
#61. Never go to another woman about your woman. Not unless you want an insidious form of advice.
Donna Lynn Hope
#62. The more physical the activity, the less the difficulties will be. The more the activity becomes intellectual and turns into motives which exercise a determining influence on the commander's will, the more the difficulties will increase.
Carl Von Clausewitz
#63. 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
#64. Neither pleasure nor pain should enter as motives when one must do what must be done.
Julius Evola
#65. 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
#66. 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
#67. 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
#68. 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
#69. 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
#70. Occasionally we all do wrong things from right motives. Only time can prove us right or wrong. The past is the past. Nothing can change it now, and who is to say that it was all wrong, anyway?
Mary Balogh
#71. 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
#72. 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
#73. You can have the most wonderful motives for what you do, but if what you do harms other people, you're fooling yourself.
John Carroll Lynch
#74. 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
#75. 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
#76. Mankind are divided into sects, and individuals think very differently on religious subjects, from the purest motives; and that gracious common Parent, who loves all his children alike, beholds with approbation every one who worships him in sincerity.
Joseph Lancaster
#77. The only words free of suspicious motives will be the ones I find in books.
Michelle Moran
#78. When, as the researchers put it, "life's fragility is primed," people's goals and motives in their everyday lives shift completely. It's perspective, not age, that matters most. Tolstoy
Atul Gawande
#79. When one has extensively pondered about men, as a career or as a vocation, one sometimes feels nostalgic for primates. At least they do not have ulterior motives.
Albert Camus
#80. Everyone had their own agenda. She just had to stop reacting emotionally: decipher the real motives for their behaviour without taking every word as a personal attack.
Abby McDonald
#81. 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
#82. 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.
#84. If you are kind, people may accuse you of ulterior motives. Be kind anyway.
Mother Teresa
#85. I invest because I love helping entrepreneurs and watching them learn and succeed. In my opinion your motives are driven by self serving factors around ego satisfaction and "making a buck". My motives and values are very different.
Ron Conway
#86. You brought me here with impure motives?" The idea gave her a stupid thrill.
He shook his head. "No. I developed them after you arrived.
Ruthie Knox
#87. 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
#88. If your motives are high and noble and your work is hard and you do a good job, then whatever the task is in your life, it will benefit you.
Frederick Lenz
#90. Listen to others as if they are telling you the truth, ask questions when you aren't clear, and allow others the room to have different feelings than you. No more assigning hidden motives, prejudging and cutting people off before separating fact from fiction.
Rhonda Britten
#91. 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
#92. 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
#93. 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
#94. 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
#95. 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
#96. We're now interested in finding those who may attack America and arrest them before they do. We've had over nearly a thousand people have been detained in America and questioned about their motives and their intentions.
George W. Bush
#97. 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
#98. 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
#99. Are they dead that yet speak louder than we can speak, and a more universal language? Are they dead that yet act? Are they dead that yet move upon society and inspire the people with nobler motives and more heroic patriotism?
Henry Ward Beecher
#100. 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
