Motives Quotes

• No one is willing to believe that adults too, like children, wander about this earth in a daze and, like children, do not know where they come from or where they are going, act as rarely as they do according to genuine motives, and are as thoroughly governed as they are by biscuits and cake and the rod.

  

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
  • Believe
  • Children
  • Governed

• Your task as a leader is to help others to succeed, not to strive only for your own success. If I don't trust your motives, nothing else will matter -because my primary concern is your integrity.

  

  David Maister
  • Success
  • Matter
  • Leader

• However much I may sympathise with and admire worthy motives, I am an uncompromising opponent of violent methods even to serve the noblest of causes.

  

  Mahatma Gandhi
  • Opponent
  • Motives
  • Sympathies

• He who has conferred a benefit on anyone from motives of love or honor will feel pain, if he sees that the benefit is received without gratitude.

  

  Aristotle
  • Love
  • Honor
  • Gratitude

• The less men are fettered by tradition, the greater becomes the inward activity of their motives, and greater again in proportion to their outer restlessness.

  

  Friedrich Nietzsche
  • Tradition
  • Motives
  • Fettered

• During the Vietnam era, more than 30,000 draft dodgers and deserters sought harbor in cities like Montreal and Toronto, where public opposition to the war was strong and most residents didn't question their motives.

  

  Wil S. Hylton
  • Strong
  • Question
  • Opposition

• It is the misfortune of all miscellaneous political combinations, that with the purest motives of their more generous members are ever mixed the most sordid interests and the fiercest passions of mean confedes.

  

  Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton
  • Interests
  • Members
  • Passions

• You become what you give your attention to...If you yourself don't choose what thoughts and images you expose yourself to, someone else will, and their motives may not be the highest.

  

  Epictetus
  • Attention
  • Images
  • Motives

• Attitudes turning into motives, meeting resistance, creating conflict, and leading to consequences—becoming plot.

  

  Ansen Dibell
  • Conflict
  • Plot
  • Attitudes

• One must have deeper motives and judge everything accordingly, but go on talking like an ordinary person.

  

  Blaise Pascal
  • Judge
  • Talking
  • Motives

• I realised I was tiring of our games, fed up with trying to second guess his motives, weary of trying to hold myself aloof so that I wouldn't lose face.

  

  Catherine Sanderson
  • Games
  • Guess
  • His

• The most terrible of motives and the most unanswerable of responses: Because.

  

  Victor Hugo
  • Motives
  • Responses

• Pure motives can never justify impure or violent action.

  

  Mahatma Gandhi
  • Motives
  • Justify
  • Violent Action

• God made man to go by motives, and he will not go without them, any more than a boat without steam or a balloon without gas.

  

  Henry Ward Beecher
  • God
  • Man
  • Motives

• We would be ashamed of our best behavior if the people knew the motives of our behaving so.

  

  Victor Hugo
  • Behavior
  • Ashamed
  • Motives

• See a person's means ... Observe his motives. Examine that in which he rests. How can a person conceal his character?

  

  Confucius
  • Character
  • Motives
  • Examine

• If we rush ceaselessly through disconnected activities without checking in on our moods or motives, we can lose track of ourselves; in a sense, we lose the ability to experience our experiences.

  

  Eva Hoffman
  • Experiences
  • Activities
  • Disconnected

• There are indeed people with ulterior motives who don't wish Chinese swimming well; they even don't wish Asian swimming well. We cannot let these people's plans succeed.

  

  Sun Yang
  • Swimming
  • Motives
  • Asian

• Belief, thus, in the supernatural, great as are the services which it rendered in the early stages of human development, cannot be considered to be any longer required, either for enabling us to know what is right and wrong in social morality, or for supplying us with motives to do right and to abstain from wrong.

  

  John Stuart Mill
  • Belief
  • Development
  • Morality

• One must know ones enemy as he is, not as one, for whatever motives, wishes him to be.

  

  Eugen Kogon
  • Enemy
  • Wishes
  • Motives

• Look at the means which a man employs, consider his motives, observe his pleasures. A man simply cannot conceal himself!

  

  Confucius
  • Means
  • Pleasures
  • Motives

• The fourfold root of the principle of sufficent reason is "Anything perceived has a cause. All conclusions have premises. All effects have causes. All actions have motives.

  

  Arthur Schopenhauer
  • Reason
  • Conclusions
  • Motives

• It's a world in which people's motives are questionable and shadowy.

  

  Steven Soderbergh
  • Motives
  • Shadowy

• One must be truthful with oneself about one's own motives, especially if one is to survive in the world. It takes rigor, and it takes courage.

  

  Emile Chartier
  • Courage
  • Survive
  • Motives

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