Motive Quotes

• None of us has ever seen a motive. Therefore, we don't know we can't do anything more than suspect what inspires the action of another. For this good and valid reason, we're told not to judge. Tragedy is that our attention centers on what people are not, rather than on what they are and who they might become.

  

  Barbara Brennan
  • Action
  • Attention
  • Judge

• Take away the motive, and you take away the sin.

  

  Miguel de Cervantes
  • Sin
  • Motive
  • Take Away

• No motive is pure. No one is good or bad-but a hearty mix of both. And sometimes life actually gives to you by taking away.

  

  Carrie Fisher
  • Sometimes
  • Pure
  • Hearty

• For a war to be just three conditions are necessary - public authority, just cause, right motive.

  

  Ernest Hemingway
  • War
  • Peace
  • Authority

• Now that Stevenson is dead I can think of but one English- speaking author who is really keeping his self-respect and sticking forperfection. Of course I refer to that mighty master of language and keen student of human actions and motives, Henry James.

  

  Willa Cather
  • Thinking
  • Action
  • Language

• 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
  • Dangerous
  • Example
  • Goodness

• If the motive of writing is for some people a kind of exercise in dirty laundry, that's one thing. I've always thought of my poems as meant to be overheard, as I think all of these poems are. It seems to me if you get experience right, even your most painful or humiliating experiences - if you get those experiences right for yourself and make discoveries as you go along and find for them some formal glue - they will be poems for others.

  

  Stephen Dunn
  • Writing
  • Kind
  • Exercise

• When the severity of the law is to be softened, let pity, not bribes, be the motive.

  

  Miguel de Cervantes
  • Law
  • Motive
  • Severity

• No one can expect a majority to be stirred by motives other than ignoble.

  

  Norman Douglas
  • Majority
  • Motive
  • Ignoble

• Love provides the motive for obeying the commands of the law, but the law provides specific direction for exercising love.

  

  Jerry Bridges
  • Love
  • Law
  • Commands

• No woman dares to refuse love without a motive, for nothing is more natural than to yield to love.

  

  Honore de Balzac
  • Love
  • Woman
  • For Her

• The light of lights looks always on the motive, not the deed, the shadow of shadows on the deed alone.

  

  William Butler Yeats
  • inspirational
  • Shadow
  • Deeds

• The greatest cause of evil included all human motives in one giant paradox. Good and bad were so inextricably mixed that we couldn't make them out; bad seemed to lead to good, and good motives led to bad. The paradox is that evil comes from man's urge to heroic victory over evil.

  

  Ernest Becker
  • Humans
  • Causes
  • Paradox

• No game in the world is as tidy and dramatically neat as baseball, with cause and effect, crime and punishment, motive and result, so cleanly defined.

  

  Paul Gallico
  • Baseball
  • Result
  • Motive

• True greatness does not consist so much in doing extraordinary things, as in conducting ordinary affairs with a noble demeanor and from a right motive. It is necessary and most profitable to remember the advice to Titus, "Showing all good fidelity in all things."

  

  Elias Lyman Magoon
  • Remember
  • Advice
  • Greatness

• No one does anything from a single motive.

  

  Samuel Taylor Coleridge
  • Single
  • Motive
  • Does

• How working for the wrong motives poisons our creativity and warps our ideas of success and failure.

  

  Ray Bradbury
  • Writing
  • Ideas
  • Creativity

• What we believe to be the motives of our conduct are usually but the pretexts for it.

  

  Miguel de Unamuno
  • Believe
  • Motive
  • Pretext

• I try to be careful with my persuasiveness. When my heart is really behind it, and when I have no ulterior motive, then I know I’m truly persuasive.

  

  Giancarlo Esposito
  • Heart
  • Motive
  • Persuasive

• The 'Inside-Out' approach to personal and interpersonal effectiveness means to start first with self; even more fundamentally, to start with the most inside part of self, with your paradigms, your character, and your motives. The inside-out approach says that private victories precede public victories, that making and keeping promises to ourselves recedes making and keeping promises to others. It says it is futile to put personality ahead of character, to try to improve relationships with others before improving ourselves.

  

  Stephen Covey
  • Trying
  • Character
  • Mean

• Whatever touches the nerves of motive, whatever shifts man's moral position, is mightier than steam, or calorie, or lightening.

  

  Edwin Hubbell Chapin
  • Moral
  • Nerves
  • Lightening

• Self-awareness is our capacity to stand apart from ourselves and examine our thinking, our motives, our history, our scripts, our actions, and our habits and tendencies.

  

  Stephen Covey
  • Action
  • Habit
  • Awareness

• Once you let yourself begin to be grown-up, you face a world full of problems you can't solve. The politicians and specialists - adults, all - have a hard enough time trying to figure out where to look. It doesn't have to be that way. The greatest solutions in society are reached by corporate thinking, ruled by a motive to either make a profit or go out of business.

  

  Ray Bradbury
  • World
  • Trying
  • Problem

• We all remember epochs in our experience when some dear expectation dies, or some new motive is born.

  

  George Eliot
  • Experience
  • Remember
  • Motive

1

2

3

4

previous

next