Top 100 The Motive Quotes
#1. I don't necessarily find superheroes in general, for me, that appealing. I'd much prefer to play, if I was to be cast in a superhero film, I'd prefer to play the villain because there's a reason, there's a motive behind their madness.
Ryan Kwanten
#2. Because impudence is a vice, it does not follow that modesty is a virtue; it is built upon shame, a passion in our nature, and may be either good or bad according to the actions performed from that motive.
Bernard De Mandeville
#3. That is the best instruction you could ever give a poet: whether you're examining a bad line in a poem or a bad motive for action, keep well your repining - meaning, don't ignore the honest muttering in your head.
Alice Oswald
#4. But, if I dare say it, it wasn't until I had helped kill a man that I realized how elusive and complex an act a murder can actually be, and not necessarily attributable to one dramatic motive.
Donna Tartt
#6. Few men could explain why they enlisted, and if they attempted they might only prove that they had done as a politician said the electorate does, the right thing from the wrong motive.
Patrick MacGill
#7. Black Power If the motive is good, and there are no other possibilities, then seen most deeply it [violence] is nonviolence, because its aim is to help others.
Dalai Lama
#8. The difference there is betwixt honor and honesty seems to be chiefly the motive; the mere honest man does that from duty which the man of honor does for the sake of character.
William Shenstone
#9. The human race is where everyone is under control by other people, no one controls his own life; the best thing you can ever do is to choose somebody who controls your life with good motive.
Aiden Mccoy
#10. This it is to be a man of the highest type: to be and not seem; to do and not simply to talk; to have the right ideal, the true motive and patiently to transform conduct in accordance with it.
Ossian Everett Mills
#11. The profit motive, when it is the sole basis of an economic system, encourages a cutthroat competition and selfish ambition that inspires men to be more concerned about making a living than making a life.
Martin Luther King Jr.
#12. Historically, alliances had been formed to augment a nation's strength in case of war; as World War I approached, the primary motive for war was to strengthen the alliances.
Henry Kissinger
#13. I believe absolutely in love being the central motive force of the universe.
Laurence Housman
#15. If we are devoted to the cause of humanity, we shall soon be crushed and broken-hearted, for we shall often meet with more ingratitude from men than we would from a dog; but if our motive is love to God, no ingratitude can hinder us from serving our fellow men.
Oswald Chambers
#16. Love turns all the wheels of human industry, is the motive power under the world's machinery, makes worthwhile every enterprise on the earth, is coequal with life, outlasts death, and reaches onward into heaven.
Margaret Elizabeth Sangster
#17. He is the best sailor who can steer within fewest points of the wind, and exact a motive power out of the greatest obstacles.
Walter Scott
#18. Since life requires a specific course of action, any other course will destroy it. A being who does not hold his own life as the motive and goal of his actions, is acting on the motive and standard of death.
Ayn Rand
#19. What makes life dreary is the want of a motive.
George Eliot
#20. Anyone can get angry, but to do this to the right person, to the right extent, at the right time, with the right motive, and in the right way, that is not for everyone, nor is it easy.
Aristotle.
#21. Man's responsibility, then, is to choose his destination; the motive power to bring him there is furnished by the Infinite.
Neville Goddard
#22. Where destruction is the motive, unity is dangerous. For example, if I have evil intent and I galvanize that evil intent with many others, the capacity to destroy is immense. Where goodness is the motive, unity is phenomenal and actually has some good issues to it.
Ravi Zacharias
#23. Because we are saturated with life, because we are human, our strongest motive is life, humanity; and the stronger the motive back of the line the stronger, and therefore more beautiful, the line will be.
Robert Henri
#24. I want my books to explore motives which make people think, 'Wow! Imagine the psychological state you'd have to be in for that to be your motive!' Whereas things like blackmail, jealousy - they're rational reasons for committing murder.
Sophie Hannah
#25. The Sermon on the Mount seems dangerous. It challenges the whole underlying conception on which modern society is built. It would replace it by a new conception, animate it with a new motive, and turn it toward a new goal.
E. Stanley Jones
#26. It is faith that moves mountains, not reason. Reason is a tool, but it can never be the motive force of the crowd." This
Jonah Goldberg
#27. Fawcett once described fear as the 'motive power of all evil' which had 'excluded humanity from the Garden of Eden.
David Grann
#28. The will of life and death,
never share the same motivation ...
we all know that love is the ultimate motive to die for ...
but let's not kid ourselves ...
... we all know the ultimate motive to rise back from the dead is vengeance.
Non Nomen
#29. There is no humiliation worse than the consciousness of a wasted
life. It stains the spirit, forestalls hope, and destroys any motive for
action or change.
Peter Ackroyd
#30. For the greatest revolutionary changes on this earth would not have been thinkable if their motive force, instead of fanatical, yes, hysterical passion, had been merely the bourgeois virtues of law and order.
Adolf Hitler
#31. It is motive alone that gives real value to the actions of men, and disinterestedness puts the cap to it.
Jean De La Bruyere
#32. We are most of us brought up in the notion that the highest motive for not doing a wrong is something irrespective of the beings who would suffer the wrong.
George Eliot
#33. If you're against globalisation, it doesn't achieve much by sort of bombing the head offices of Shell or Nestle. You unsettle people much more by blowing up an Oxfam shop because people can't understand the motive.
J.G. Ballard
#34. One should guard against preaching to young people success in the customary form as the main aim in life. The most important motive for work in school and in life is pleasure in work, pleasure in its result, and the knowledge of the value of the result to the community.
Albert Einstein
#35. That man is the most loyal who aims at the noblest motive, and that motive the public good.
Virgil
#36. And all shall be well and/ All manner of thing shall be well/ By the purification of the motive/ In the ground of our beseeching
T. S. Eliot
#37. But this graveyard of dead books doesn't unnerve me. It reminds me that I had a deeper motive, one that only the approach of old age and death has unlocked. I wrote to answer questions I had - the motive of all art, whatever its ostensible subject. There were things I urgently needed to know.
James Atlas
#38. I'm not trying to teach anybody anything, I'm not trying to say anything, I have no political motive whatsoever. My motive is just the big laugh.
Jeff Dunham
#39. The motive of grace is the infinite, compassionate love of a merciful God, but the work of grace was the death of Christ on the cross.
Billy Graham
#40. I believe that the human motive to share is very powerful. The human motive to profit is also very powerful, and I think that the profit motive and the sharing motive are not exclusive.
Tim O'Reilly
#42. Negroes, like other people, act upon motives. Why should they do anything for us, if we will do nothing for them? If they stake their lives for us, they must be prompted by the strongest motive, even the promise of freedom. And the promise being made, must be kept.
Abraham Lincoln
#43. The people, and the people alone, are the motive force in the making of world history.
Mao Zedong
#44. Never fear to bring the sublimest motive to the smallest duty, and the most infinite comfort to the smallest trouble.
Phillips Brooks
#45. Want keeps pace with dignity. Destitute of the lawful means of supporting his rank, his dignity presents a motive for malversation, and his power furnishes the means.
Jeremy Bentham
#46. The love of admiration leads to fraud, much more than the love of commendation; but, on the other hand, the latter is much more likely to spoil our: good actions by the substitution of an inferior motive.
Richard Whately
#47. Revenge! The stupidest motive on earth, just an attempt to change history.
Josephine Humphreys
#48. Do not have as your motive the desire to be known as a praying man. Get an inner chamber in which to pray where no one knows you are praying, shut the door, and talk to God in secret.
Oswald Chambers
#49. Tis the motive exalts the action; 'Tis the doing, and not the deed.
Margaret Preston
#50. 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
#51. Actions whose motives he cannot understand that is, actions not prompted by the hope of profit.
Andre Gide
#52. The morality of an action depends on the motive from which we act. If I fling half a crown to a beggar with intention to break his head and he picks it up and buy victuals with it, the physical effect is good. But with respect to me the action is very wrong.
Samuel Johnson
#53. The atmosphere is much too near for dreams. It forces us to action. It is close to us. We are in it and of it. It rouses us both to study and to do. We must know its moods and also its motive forces.
Cleveland Abbe
#54. Reason can no more influence the will, and operate as a motive, than the eyes which show a man his road can enable him to move from place to place, or that a ship provided with a compass can sail without a wind.
Richard Whately
#55. Self-interest lies behind all that men do, forming the important motive for all their actions; this rule has never deceived me
Marquis De Sade
#56. If interstellar travel is as time- or energy- demanding as the above figures indicate, it is far from obvious what the motive for colonization might be.
Barney Oliver
#57. Stories are my art and my solace. They could also be my weapons. Stories give more than facts. Stories touch the conscience and stimulate action. That is my motive and my goal, to put research and study and feeling into that cauldron called the novel.
Sonia Levitin
#58. The good opinion of our fellow men is the strongest, though not the purest motive to virtue.
Charles Caleb Colton
#59. The motive for metaphor ... is a desire to associate, and finally to identify, the human mind with what goes on outside it, because the only genuine joy you can have is in those rare moments when you feel that although we may know in part, as Paul says, we are also a part of what we know.
Northrop Frye
#60. If you're actually allowing your creative part to control your writing rather than a more commercial instinct or motive, then you'll find that all sorts of interesting things will bubble up to the surface.
Emma Thompson
#61. The only motive that there ever was was to completely control a person; a person I found physically attractive. And keep them with me as long as possible, even if it meant just keeping a part of them.
Jeffrey Dahmer
#62. It is a deformity in some 'radicals' to imagine that, once they have found the lowest or meanest motive for an action or for a person, they have correctly identified the authentic or 'real' one. Many a purge or show trial has got merrily under way in this manner.
Christopher Hitchens
#63. Give a good deed the credit of a good motive; and give an evil deed the benefit of the doubt.
Brander Matthews
#64. Shocking writing is like murder: the questions the jury must decide are the questions of motive and intent.
E.B. White
#65. If three steps are taken without any other motive than the desire to obey God, those three steps are miraculous; they are equally so whether they take place on dry land or on water.
Simone Weil
#66. Given involuntarily, and in an atmosphere of distrust, pain is torture, whatever the motive," suggests David. "But given consensually, between equals, pain can be a most incredible form of love.
Geoff Mains
#67. Everyone has an ulterior motive. Everyone wants something, and everyone is willing to do whatever they have
to in order to get it. Regardless of who winds up hurt in the process.
Kyra Dune
#68. It is all right when God sends us the approval of our fellow men; however, we must never make that approval a motive in our life.
A.B. Simpson
#69. The motive of art comes to us not from what exists, but from the notion that there is something higher, something nobler, something richer, and that what exists corresponds only partially to all of this.
Abraham Kuyper
#70. The first expression of religion was the dance, and the first motive of the dance was religion.
La Meri
#72. Looking forward, it might prove constructive to examine the true historical record of an issue prior to assuming the worst of anyone's motive and deconstructing and questioning anyone's Democratic bona fides. After all, we liberals got feelings.
Gary Ackerman
#73. For an act may be wrong judged purely by itself, but when the motive that prompted the act is understood, it is construed differently. I lay it down as an axiom, that only that is criminal in the sight of God where crime is meditated.
Elizabeth Keckley
#74. Clarity, clarity, surely clarity is the most beautiful thing in the world, A limited, limiting clarity I have not and never did have any motive of poetry But to achieve clarity.
George Oppen
#75. If your motive is in any way to promote greatness for yourself, you're in the wrong calling.
Charles R. Swindoll
#76. Elphaba gave him a sidelong glance. "I think you enjoy going to school, Nick. Are you sure canoodling with teenage girls isn't your ulterior motive?"
"Perish the thought, Elphaba, perish the thought. I'm too old for that." Nick winked. "By about eight hundred years.
Abramelin Keldor
#77. Does the mind will, in any given manner, without a motive, cause or ground, which renders the given choice, rather than a different choice, certain.
Jonathan Edwards
#78. As for myself, I have found my perfect pattern in Jesus, who said, "The Father has not left Me
alone, for I always do those things that please Him." I am no longer motivated by personal ambition.
I have discovered a sweeter, purer motive: simply to please my Father.
Derek Prince
#79. There are two motives for writing a book: one, that you may save what you know, the other, that you may share what you know with the public.
Ifeanyi Enoch Onuoha
#80. An odious crime, as old as the Bible and for an utterly despicable motive too and carried out in a cowardly manner, making use of intermediaries.
Javier Marias
#81. There is thus a very great deal in common between the enthusiasm with which Mohammed's teaching attacked the priesthood, the Mass and the sacraments, and the enthusiasm with which Calvinism, the central motive force of the Reformation, did the same.
Hilaire Belloc
#82. She understood that she must not write merely to win fame for herself or even for the higher motive of pure pleasure in her work. She must aim, however humbly, to help her readers to higher planes of thought and endeavor. Then and only then would it be worth while.
L.M. Montgomery
#83. Vanity is so frequently the apparent motive of advice, that we, for the most part, summon our powers to oppose it without any very accurate inquiry whether it is right.
Samuel Johnson
#84. The profit motive is not only fundamental to our ability to reward shareholders and pay employees; it's fundamental to excellent journalism. Far from corrupting the craft, profits enhance it. Expansion drives diversity and diversity protects and strengthens our craft.
Lachlan Murdoch
#85. When I have a particular case in hand, I have that motive and feel an interest in the case, feel an interest in ferreting out the questions to the bottom, love to dig up the question by the roots and hold it up and dry it before the fires of the mind.
Abraham Lincoln
#86. The child is a realist in every domain of thought, and it is therefore natural that in the moral sphere he should lay more stress on the external, tangible element than on the hidden motive.
Jean Piaget
#87. In many criminals, especially youthful ones, it is possible to detect a very powerful sense of guilt which existed before the crime, and is therefore not its result but its motive. It is as if it was a relief to be able to fasten this unconscious sense of guilt on to something real and immediate.
Sigmund Freud
#88. Gurion would lament: What is the good of trying to do justice if God will kill me and my family whether or not I do justice?
Adam Levin
#89. Religion is a great force - the only real motive force in the world; but what you fellows don't understand is that you must get at a man through his own religion and not through yours.
George Bernard Shaw
#90. The guiding motive of mankind should be charity towards men, charity towards all animals.
Swami Vivekananda
#91. But you also admitted to her being in the shadows and not having a clear view of him."
"What would be his motive?"
"Perhaps he saw me kissing Mary."
"Killing the man for kissing your betrothed seems a bit drastic."
I would, he thought, surprised by the vehement behind the words.
Lorraine Heath
#93. The sun alone appears, by virtue of his dignity and power, suited for this motive duty (of moving the planets) and worthy to become the home of God himself.
Johannes Kepler
#94. One glance at any government budget anywhere in the world tells the story - the money is always in place, already allocated, the motive everywhere is fear, the more immediate the fear, the higher the multiples.
Thomas Pynchon
#96. All great acquisitions come from voluntary thought" was Elizabeth's guiding principle. She would not cultivate any motive for learning in her students besides curiosity, claiming that study for the sake of reward or in fear of punishment produced "superficial rather than profound" knowledge.
Megan Marshall
#97. God Almighty created each and every one of use for a place in the world, and for the least of us to think that we were created only to be what we are and not what we can make ourselves, is to impute an improper motive to the Creator for creating is.
Marcus Garvey
#98. Our gifts are very pleasant to Him. He loves to see us lay our time, our talents, our substance on the altar not for the value of what we give, but for the sake of the motive from which the gift springs.
Charles Haddon Spurgeon
#99. The last motive in the world for acquiring vocabulary should be to impress. Words should be acquired because we urgently need them - to convey, to reach, to express something within us, and to understand others.
Vanna Bonta
#100. Talent works for money and fame; the motive which moves genius to productivity is, on the other hand, less easy to determine.
Arthur Schopenhauer
