Motive Quotes
- Page 2Because 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
My great crime in the world is blunder I will get into scrapes without intention or any bad motive.
Stand Watie
The husband - by primitive instinct partly, certainly by ancient tradition - regards himself as the active partner in matters of love and his own pleasure as legitimately the prime motive for activity.
Havelock Ellis
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
To withdraw myself from myself has ever been my sole, my entire, my sincere motive in scribbling at all.
Lord Byron
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
Do not ever say that the desire to "do good" by force is a good motive. Neither power-lust nor stupidity are good motives.
Ayn Rand
Prayer's important, not just as some kind of a metaphysical exercise, but I think it's a way to refresh one's own mind and motive. If you're praying, you're really looking beyond your own personal thoughts and the pressures that are around you.
Mike Huckabee
We want deeper sincerity of motive, a greater courage in speech and earnestness in action.
Sarojini Naidu
As I wrote I began to see more strongly that there were inescapable analogies. You couldn't really live through the '80s without feeling how crass and distasteful some of the economic doctrines were. The slave trade is a perfect model for that kind of total devotion to the profit motive without reckoning the human consequences.
Barry Unsworth
It is a good motive, fame and money, as it is tangible and measurable. Being an artist is neither measurable nor tangible and certainly not a way to become rich.
Dirk Benedict
We acknowledge but one motive - to follow the truth as we know it, whithersoever it may lead us; but in our heart of hearts we are well assured that the truth which has made us free, will in the end make us glad also.
Mortimer Adler
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
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
Cruelty, like every other vice, requires no motive outside of itself; it only requires opportunity.
George Eliot
My head can get to murder and rape for profit because I can understand greed as a human motive, but I cannot understand the voyeuristic desire to watch such a film. I can comprehend one and I cannot comprehend the other.
Donna Leon
That he delights in the misery of others no man will confess, and yet what other motive can make a father cruel?
Joseph Addison
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
The light of lights looks always on the motive, not the deed, the shadow of shadows on the deed alone.
William Butler Yeats
Individual ambition is undoubtedly a strong motive in student work, but there is such a thing among students everywhere as ambition for others, call it class spirit, esprit de corps, good fellowship, or good will to men.
Herbert Baxter Adams
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
The overcoming of adversity and, ultimately, denying it the rite of passage, has been a constant and perpetual motive throughout my life.
Heather Mills
I, Alexander B. Campbell, make this statement of the cause of my death to relieve the coroner of the necessity of an inquest, and also let my friends know the motive that led me to take my own life.
Alex Campbell
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