Top 100 Quotes About Motives
#1. A person must move beyond guilt and unexamined thoughts and motives in order to discover a purpose for living vibrantly.
Kilroy J. Oldster
#2. Even in political considerations, now-a-days, you have stronger motives to feel interested in the fate of Europe than in the fate of the Central or Southern parts of America.
Lajos Kossuth
#3. We can never understand other people's motives, nor their furniture.
Mignon McLaughlin
#4. Was she not so simple and free of ulterior motives as she looked? Well, neither was I.
Saul Bellow
#5. Magnanimity will not consider the prudence of its motives.
Luc De Clapiers
#6. 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
#7. 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
#8. War seems to be ingrained in human nature, and even to be regarded as something noble to which man is inspired by his love of honor, without selfish motives.
Immanuel Kant
#9. Gaining insight into one's underlying motives, it seems, is more like a belief conversion than a self-discovery process
Albert Bandura
#10. One cannot live without motives. I have no motives left, and I am living.
Emil Cioran
#12. To act intelligently in human affairs is only possible if an attempt is made to understand the thoughts, motives, and apprehensions of one's opponent so fully that one can see the world through his eyes.
Albert Einstein
#14. 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
#15. Politicians are usually the first to forget that if you assume someone else is acting in bad faith, they will do the same to you. Questioning motives poisons the well.
John Sununu
#16. And then there's Israel - a lot of people support Israel, and it's important to Israel to take out Iraq. So it's all mixed together. It's a combination of motives.
Chris Matthews
#17. If you wait until your motives are pure and unselfish before you do something, you will wait forever.
Timothy Keller
#18. However absurd it may seem, I do in all seriousness hereby declare that I am animated mainly by philanthropic motives. I desire to do good to my fellow creatures, even to the Cui bonos.
Oliver Heaviside
#19. The most terrible of motives and the most unanswerable of responses: Because.
Victor Hugo
#21. Since women ask me about male motives all the time, I can offer a bit of advice. If you feel like you're going to get hurt then you shouldn't be there in the first place. That's the way I look at relationships.
Chris Noth
#22. For undemocratic reasons and for motives not of State, they arrive at their conclusions, largely inarticulate. Being void of self-expression they confide their views to none; but sometimes in a smoking room, one learns why things were done.
Rudyard Kipling
#23. One of the painful signs of years of dumbed-down education is how many people are unable to make a coherent argument. They can vent their emotions, question other people's motives, make bold assertions, repeat slogans
anything except reason.
Thomas Sowell
#24. What was paramount in the apostles' earliest motives was oral proclamation of the gospel. They wanted to disseminate the word as quickly as possible.
J. Ed Komoszewski
#25. Pure motives can never justify impure or violent action.
Mahatma Gandhi
#26. The inner thought coming from the heart represents the real motives and desires. These are the cause of action.
Raymond Holliwell
#27. But what a way to do things-never to perform a decent action until you are kicked into it and the rest of the world has ceased to believe that your motives can possibly be honest.
George Orwell
#28. 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
#29. I have always been taught ... that every man is divinely called to his work, if that work is for the good of all men. His faithfulness or unfaithfulness to the call is revealed in the motives that prompt him to choose his field.
Harold Bell Wright
#30. In every bad situation we have to see Satan's motives behind a person's actions
Sunday Adelaja
#31. The habit of employing self-deception to maintain one's self esteem has often become so ingrained that the first step to developing accurate self-awareness is honest acknowledgment of the existence of hidden emotions, motives and tendencies in the mind without immediately suppressing them.
Bhikkhu Analayo
#32. Gods tend to be selfish. Even when they're helpful, they always have their own motives. That's why you have to be careful about trusting them.
Rick Riordan
#33. 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
#35. Rampton suggested that one could derive a "fair picture of a man's true attitudes and motives from what he says and from the kind of people he associates with and speaks to.
Deborah E. Lipstadt
#36. The young men were born with knives in their brain, a tendency to introversion, self-dissection, anatomizing of motives.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#37. Circumstances of crimes vary. So do motives. And so do prospects for rehabilitation. The number of imponderables makes it impossible to sentence by formula and still sentence justly.
Robert Kennedy
#38. Everyone has motives. Let's acknowledge that and get on with the interesting part.
Stephen C. Meyer
#39. We are all shot through with enough motives to make a massacre, any day of the week that we want to give them their head.
Jacob Bronowski
#40. Heart and Brain are the two lords of life. In the metaphors of ordinary speech and in the stricter language of science, we use these terms to indicate two central powers, from which all motives radiate, to which all influences converge.
George Henry Lewes
#41. Even the wisdom of God hath not suggested more pressing motives, more powerful incentives to charity, than these, that we shall be judged by it at the last dreadful day.
Francis Atterbury
#42. Companies' motives to make profit means they neglect inherent social or moral values.
Russell Brand
#43. Capitalism justified itself and was adopted as an economic principle on the express ground that it provides selfish motives for doing good, and that human beings will do nothing except for selfish motives
George Bernard Shaw
#44. 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
#45. This history of culture will explain to us the motives, the conditions of life, and the thought of the writer or reformer.
Leo Tolstoy
#46. Is not everything that we consider important our betrayer ? It shows where our motives lie, and where our motives are altogether lacking.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#47. 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
#48. Money destroys human roots wherever it is able to penetrate, by turning desire for gain into the sole motive. It easily manages to outweigh all other motives, because the effort it demands of the mind is so very much less. Nothing is so clear and so simple as a row of figures.
Simone Weil
#49. You need to put aside your own selfish motives and consider other people for a change.
Joe Schreiber
#50. It is the media that controls the boundaries of what is politically permissible, so better to change the media. Profit motives work against it, but if we can have the audience understand that most other forms of journalism are not credible, then it may be a forced move.
Julian Assange
#51. You can question somebody's views and their judgment without questioning their motives or patriotism.
Barack Obama
#52. When you constantly question the motives of others you can't see them in their truest form.
Jayce O'Neal
#53. Intellectuals are in a position to expose the lies of governments, to analyze actions according to their causes and motives and often hidden intentions.
Noam Chomsky
#54. Never judge a man's actions until you know his motives
Vikas Swarup
#55. I am a journalist and have no earthly motives except curiosity and personal vanity.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
#56. Art needs motives that are more profound than profit if it is to maintain its difference from - and position above - other cultural forms.
Sarah Thornton
#57. And I envy the intransigence of my own
Countrymen who shoot to kill and never
See the victim's face become their own
Or find his motive sabotage their motives.
Louis MacNeice
#58. The secret of every durable ... social system is the recasting of 'functional prerequisites' into behavioral motives for actors.
Zygmunt Bauman
#59. The fear of punishment may be necessary to the suppression of vice; but it also suspends the finer motives of virtue.
William Hazlitt
#60. I kind of stumbled into acting, even though I've always been fascinated by people and kind of their motives, and it's been amazing to me, everything I read before about psychology, philosophy, just to put it into practice somehow.
Adan Canto
#61. Building trust is key to discovering and understanding your buyers' motives.
Grant Cardone
#62. The human moral sense can excuse any atrocity in the minds of those who commit it, and it furnishes them with motives for acts of violence that bring them no tangible benefit.
Steven Pinker
#63. The most common motives for homicide are moralistic: retaliation after an insult, escalation of a domestic quarrel, punishing an unfaithful or deserting romantic partner, and other acts of jealousy, revenge, and self-defense.
Steven Pinker
#64. The thing is plain. All that men really understand, is confined to a very small compass; to their daily affairs and experience; to what they have an opportunity to know, and motives to study or practice. The rest is affectation and imposture.
William Hazlitt
#65. A man must learn to understand the motives of human beings, their illusions, and their sufferings.
Albert Einstein
#66. People begin running for any number of motives, but we stick to it for one basic reason-to find out who we really are.
George A. Sheehan
#67. 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
#68. I dream of a better tomorrow, where chickens can cross the road and not be questioned about their motives.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#69. This policy of supplying by opposite and rival interests, the defect of better motives, might be traced through the whole system of human affairs, both private and public.
James Madison
#70. The automobile is technologically more sophisticated than the bundling board, but the human motives in their uses are sometimes the same.
Charles Mengel Allen
#71. If the outcome is good, what's the difference between motives that sound good and good, sound motives?
Laurence J. Peter
#72. 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
#73. All of the best motives boiled down to a single, driving emotion.
Brandon Sanderson
#74. I wish sometimes you had a few bad motives, you might understand a little more about human beings.
Graham Greene
#75. CAIR officials or former officials have been arrested on charges related to terrorism yet all it offers is silence and stonewalling in discussing what are its real motives.
Paul Weyrich
#76. All I ask is ... ponder with open minds. We've made so many mistakes, humanity, during just one lifetime. Many of them perpetrated not by evildoers, drenched in malice, but by men and women filled with fine motives! Like you.
David Brin
#77. Any actor who judges his character is a fool - for every role you play you've got to absorb that character's motives and justifications.
Alan Rickman
#79. When I try to analyze my own cravings, motives, actions and so forth, I surrender to a sort of retrospective imagination which feeds the analytic faculty with boundless alternatives and which causes each visualized route to fork and re-fork without end in the maddeningly complex prospect of my past.
Vladimir Nabokov
#80. They're called 'facts', and my role is to amplify those, not cheerlead. And I don't care at all what you think of my motives.
Glenn Greenwald
#81. Pure motives are prerequisite to the ability to call down the powers of heaven. The Lord will not sustain your efforts to achieve, excel or receive special blessings if your desires are vain.
Grant Von Harrison
#82. 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
#83. Relationships, for me, have been elusive. And I would say mostly it's been my fault. I was always more concentrated on my career. And yes, you do question people's motives. Is it just because I'm him - I'm Nathan Lane?
Nathan Lane
#84. Meditation without selfless giving is not enough. You may go into very high states of consciousness but the rough edges will still be there - there may be lots of selfish motives lurking within the self - that you don't see.
Frederick Lenz
#85. There are many causes why a people politically ignorant cannot be roused to action. Perfect political ignorance must be accompanied by indifference to the general interests of society, and thus one of the most powerful motives which can act on the human mind is totally destroyed.
Benjamin Robbins Curtis
#86. If you are thinking of nything with dependence upon it, there is a motive of curiosity, or pleasure, or success, and though the thinking will help towards satisfaction you will still be in bondage. There is no harm in this, but the higher samadhi, without such motives, is best.
Ernest Wood
#87. It's your fiction that interests me. Your studies of the interplay of human motives and emotion.
Isaac Asimov
#88. 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
#89. 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
#90. I never desire to know anything of the detail of political measures, lest even those which I think best should lose anything of their intrinsic value to me, by seeing what low, paltry, personal motives and base machinery and dirty hands have helped to bring them about.
Fanny Kemble
#91. 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
#92. Allport suggested that self-esteem can often be a goal in itself: "most people want to be higher on the status ladder than they are" (p. 371). However, self-enhancement can be based in avoidance as well as approach motives. Insecurity
Anonymous
#93. I'm not questioning Dick Cheney's motives. There's a chance for a conflict of interest. At one point in time, he was opposed to going into Baghdad. Then he was out of office and involved in the defense industry, and then he became for going into Baghdad.
Rand Paul
#94. It did not then cross my mind that they, like religious apologists, might have any personal reasons for holding to this disbelief. It certainly did not cross my mind that I had any low motives for it. Unlike Christians, atheists have a high opinion of their own virtue.
Peter Hitchens
#95. Right motives give pinions to thought, and strength and freedom to speech and action.
Mary Baker Eddy
#96. Initial uniformity can be deceiving, warns the author, because parties arrive at that state from so many different motives which will be exposed over time.
Donald R. Hickey
#97. she was still uncomfortable about her own motives and afraid to examine them too deeply,
Stephen King
#98. Any attention to them (terrorists) on the part of the media, any double-standard interpretation of their motives and results of their activity means nothing but a political and administrative support of terrorist acts
Vladimir Putin
#99. So our building of the visible Church becomes much like any natural business function, using natural means and natural motives.
Francis Schaeffer
#100. The Professor shook his head. 'On the contrary, my motives are most simple, to advance science and to combat evil.
Robert Rankin
