Top 100 The Motive Quotes
#1. When the severity of the law is to be softened, let pity, not bribes, be the motive.
Miguel De Cervantes
#3. Some people are born with a vital and responsive energy. It not only enables them to keep abreast of the times; it qualifies them to furnish in their own personality a good bit of the motive power to the mad pace.
Kate Chopin
#4. 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
#5. 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
#6. When starting to think about any novel, part of the motive is: I'm going to show them, this time.
Kingsley Amis
#7. The Light of lights looks always on the motive, not the deed
The Shadow of Shadows looks on the deed alone.
W.B.Yeats
#8. Twenty-five thousand," Maggie murmured. A tidy sum, even tidier ten years ago. "You're telling me you think the money was the motive for murder?" "Money's always a motive for murder, and it's a loose end.
Nora Roberts
#9. One might almost say that the history of geographical discovery, properly so called, begins with Captain Cook, the motive of whose voyages was purely scientific curiosity.
Joseph Jacobs
#10. Socialism proposes no adequate substitute for the motive of enlightened selfishness that today is at the basis of all human labor and effort, enterprise and new activity.
William Howard Taft
#11. Know that all sins and all evils can be summed up in that one word, weakness. It is weakness that is the motive power in all evil doing; it is weakness that makes men injure others; it is weakness that makes them manifest what they are not in reality. Let them know what they really are ...
Swami Vivekananda
#12. Why, for example, should a group of simple, stable compounds of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen struggle for billions of years to organise themselves into a professor of chemistry? What's the motive?
Robert M. Pirsig
#13. The motive force of history is truth and not lies.
Leon Trotsky
#14. The Lord would so cleanse the motive and desires of our hearts that we will seek but one thing only, and that is, His glory.
Smith Wigglesworth
#15. From a moral point of view, there is no excuse for terrorist acts, regardless of the motive or the situation under which they are carried out.
Jurgen Habermas
#17. Never go into business purely to make money. If that's the motive you're better off doing nothing.
Richard Branson
#18. Prayer is not an agency by which my will is to be accomplished upon the earth. The purpose of prayer is to get God's will to be accomplished upon the earth, and so many times we ask and receive not because the motive behind our asking is really that of accomplishing my will rather than God's will.
Chuck Smith
#20. Christ in me" means Christ bearing me along from within, Christ the motive power that carries me on, Christ giving my whole life a wonderful poise and lift, and turning every burden into wings . . . not as something you have to bear but as something by which you are borne.
James Bryan Smith
#21. The true worth of a soul is revealed as much by the motive it attributes to the actions of others as by its own deeds.
Jean Antoine Petit-Senn
#22. 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
#23. And in every instance, the motive is the same: suppressing dissent and mandating compliance.
Glenn Greenwald
#24. Wonder was the motive that led people to philosophy ... wonder is a kind of desire in knowledge. It is the cause of delight because it carries with it the hope of discovery.
Thomas Aquinas
#25. 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
#26. Our Lord did not say it was wrong to pray in the corners of the street, but He did say it was wrong to have the motive to "be seen of men".
Oswald Chambers
#27. Such insignificant differences as a few hundred years here or there were the motive for long, long controversies, both public and academic, which almost always resulted in the violent breakup of personal relationships and even in mortal enmities.
Jose Saramago
#28. Man's responsibility, then, is to choose his destination; the motive power to bring him there is furnished by the Infinite.
Neville Goddard
#29. Tis e'er the wont of simple folk to prize the deed and o'erlook the motive, and of learned folk to discount the deed and lay open the soul of the doer.
John Barth
#30. Desire is poverty. Desire is the greatest impurity of the mind. Desire is the motive force for action. Desire in the mind is the real impurity. Even a spark of desire is a very great evil.
Swami Sivananda
#31. 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
#32. I had a tutor who wanted me to believe that mercy is a kind of sorrow and that since evil is the motive of sorrow, evil is also the motive of mercy. I thought that my tutor was old and cruel, and maybe he was - but now I think he was also right.
Holly Black
#33. The whole plan of extermination was nothing less than a cold blooded, calculated political measure, having for its object the annihilation of a superior element in the population, which might prove troublesome, and to this must be added the motive of greed.
Fridtjof Nansen
#34. 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
#35. 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
#36. Fawcett once described fear as the 'motive power of all evil' which had 'excluded humanity from the Garden of Eden.
David Grann
#37. The motive behind criticism often determines its validity. Those who care criticize where necessary. Those who envy criticize the moment they think that they have found a weak spot.
Criss Jami
#39. 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
#40. When the point of education becomes the production of credentials rather than the cultivation of knowledge, it forfeits the motive recognized by Aristotle: All human beings by nature desire to know.
Matthew B. Crawford
#41. If I give with the motive to get, regardless of the degree to which that motive besets me, I will walk away impoverished and I will leave those to whom I have given just as impoverished as I have now found myself.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
#42. In all living nature (and perhaps also in that which we consider as dead) love is the motive force which drives the creative activity in the most diverse directions.
P.D. Ouspensky
#43. Being-'subject' means taking up a position from which an actor can make the transition from theory to practice. This transition usually takes place once an actor has found the motive that liberates them from hesitation and disinhibits them for action.
Peter Sloterdijk
#44. Every time you read into something you miss the soul, while searching for the motive.
Shannon L. Alder
#45. It was the desire of appearing superior to other people. The motive was too common to be wondered at.
Jane Austen
#46. Cruel and cold is the judgment of man, Cruel as winter, and cold as the snow; But by-and-by will the deed and the plan Be judged by the motive that lieth below.
John L. Bates
#47. The more we see that any action springs not from the motive of obedience, the more evident is it that it is a temptation of the enemy; for when God sends an inspiration, the very first effect of it is to infuse a spirit of docility.
Teresa Of Avila
#48. Could the motive be nothing more than simple self-preservation? When you lose the instinct yourself, it's hard to remember how powerful it is for everyone else. He felt himself starting to smile.
Joe Abercrombie
#49. The motive for our actions doesn't lie ahead of us. It's something behind us that we're trying to escape.
Peter Hoeg
#50. Human desire is the criterion of all truth and all good. Truth does not lie beyond humanity, but is one of the products of the human mind and feeling. There is really nothing to fear. The motive of fear in religion is base ...
D.H. Lawrence
#51. 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
#52. 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
#53. 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
#54. We are thankful for good-will rather than for services, for the motive than the quantum of favor received.
William Hazlitt
#55. I think the motive is to establish in federal law the personhood from conception forward and try and alter the Constitution through statute.
Zoe Lofgren
#56. Ah, what a sweetner of toil is love - love to a dear earthly parent, and still more love to Christ. There is no drudgery in the most menial employment where that is the motive power.
Martha Finley
#57. What ever the motive for the insult, it is always best to overlook it; for folly doesn't deserve resentment, and malice is punished by neglect.
Samuel Johnson
#58. It is the man that makes the motive, and not the motive the man.
James McCosh
#59. He establishment of Civil and Religious Liberty was the Motive that induced me to the field of battle.
George Washington
#60. It is the duty of men to judge men only by their actions. Our faculties furnish us with no means of arriving at the motive, the character, the secret self. We call the tree good from its fruits, and the man, from his works.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#61. In proportion as a man is selfish, so far has he receded from the motive which constitutes virtue.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
#62. Glory ought to be the consequence, not the motive, of our actions; and although it happen not to attend the worthy deed, yet it is by no means the less fair for having missed the applause it deserved.
Pliny The Younger
#64. The people, and the people alone, are the motive force in the making of world history.
Mao Zedong
#65. Love provides the motive for obeying the commands of the law, but the law provides specific direction for exercising love.
Jerry Bridges
#66. I have to know the killer, the victim and the motive when I begin. Then I start to create the characters and see how the novel takes shape based on what these people are like.
Elizabeth George
#67. As Tozer said in The Pursuit of God, "it is not what a man does that determines whether his work is sacred or secular, it is why he does it. The motive is everything.
Michael Zigarelli
#68. True patriotism sometimes requires of men to act exactly contrary, at one period, to that which it does at another, and the motive which impels them the desire to do right is precisely the same.
Robert E.Lee
#69. It is quite an old-fashioned fallacy to suppose that our objection to scepticism is that it removes the discipline from life. Our objection to scepticism is that it removes the motive power. Materialism is not a thing which destroys mere restraint. Materialism itself is the great restraint.
G.K. Chesterton
#70. An action is essentially good if the motive of the agent be good, regardless of the consequences.
Immanuel Kant
#72. To sway opinion should never be the motive of argument. I argue only for pleasure.
A.E. Marling
#73. Nobody can advise and help you, nobody. There is only one single means. Go inside yourself. Discover the motive that bids you write; examine whether it sends its roots down to the deepest places of your heart, confess to yourself whether you would have to die if writing were denied you.
Rainer Maria Rilke
#74. Many people in a rather reckless context claim to 'just tell it like it is'. In actuality, nobody really stresses what one says so much as the motive behind what one says; hence, he is merely blowing hot air and detracting from 'what is'.
Criss Jami
#76. The motive for criticizing myth, that is, its objectifying representations, is present in myth itself, insofar as its real intention to talk about a transcendent power to which both we and the world are subject is hampered and obscured by the objectifying character of its assertions.
Rudolf Bultmann
#77. This part of being a man, changing the way we parent, happens only when we want it to. It changes because we are determined for it to change; and the motive for changing often comes out of wanting to be the kind of parent we didn't have.
Augustus Y. Napier
#78. Only the search for truth is valid, the desire for wisdom the motive. The method is assimilation, not study.
Idries Shah
#79. Tis the motive exalts the action; 'Tis the doing, and not the deed.
Margaret Preston
#80. I think the motive force of all our action is, after all, personal happiness.
Leo Tolstoy
#81. 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
#82. 'Helter-Skelter' was the motive for the murders. Manson borrowed that term from a Beatles song on the 'White Album.' In England, helter-skelter is a playground ride. To Manson, helter-skelter meant a war between whites and blacks that the Beatles were in favor of.
Vincent Bugliosi
#83. The short lesson that comes out of long experience in political agitation is something like this: all the motive power in all of these movements is the instinct of religious feeling. All the obstruction comes from attempting to rely on anything else. Conciliation is the enemy.
John Jay Chapman
#84. There is nothing to learn about reasoning and invention if the motive and purpose of the most conspicuous step remain incomprehensible.
George Polya
#86. The willpower to do anything would come, the songs and writings said, if the motive was pure.
Mercedes Lackey
#87. Kill a politician and you're tied to the motive that made you pull the trigger.
J.G. Ballard
#88. 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
#89. What is the motive which operates in every man's breast to counteract the impulse towards the gratification of his wants and appetites?
Jean-Baptiste Say
#90. Liberty, next to religion has been the motive of good deeds and the common pretext of crime ...
Lord Acton
#91. I am not tormented, Fern responded. I am ... diminished. I have always believed that your soul grows when you do something that is good and brave, a right thing, a true thing, and when you do evil- no matter what the motive- your soul is eroded. Well, my soul is less.
Jan Siegel
#92. 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
#93. But rules only work when everyone plays by them. What happens when someone doesn't, and the fallout bleeds right into his life? Whats stronger- the need to uphold the law, or the motive to turn one's back on it?
Jodi Picoult
#94. 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
#95. I deplore the horrible crime as child murder ... no matter what the motive, love of ease, or desire to save from suffering the unborn innocent,the woman is awfully guilty who commits the deed ... but oh, thrice guilty is he who drove her to the desperation which compelled her to the crime.
Susan B. Anthony
#96. With a stranglehold of authority it banned the statement for its reproduction or publication in part or in full. The motive on the part of the Government was obvious. It did not want Gandhi to be exposed to the public. The
Anup SarDesai
#97. The satisfaction that accompanies good acts is itself not the motivation of the act; satisfaction is not the motive, but only the consequence.
Joseph Butler
#98. She had always been ... the motive power of her own happiness.
Ayn Rand
#99. The meaning of what is said is according to the motive for saying it: because things are not subject to speech, but speech to things. Therefore we should take account of the motive of the lawgiver, rather than of his very words.
Thomas Aquinas
#100. The saving of labour of the individual should be the object and honest humanitarian considerations, and not greed, the motive.
Mahatma Gandhi
