1.
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
2.
Traveling outgrows its motives. It soon proves sufficient in itself. You think you are making a trip, but soon it is making you - or unmaking you.
Nicolas Bouvier
4.
Every instance of obedience, from right motives, strengthens us spiritually, whilst every act of disobedience weakens us.
George Muller
5.
That man is the most loyal who aims at the noblest motive, and that motive the public good.
Virgil
6.
Be sure that your motive in praying is to glorify God.
Billy Graham
7.
Discard every self-seeking motive as soon as it is seen, and you need not search for truth; truth will find you.
Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj
8.
As long as I know that my motives are good, I'm Seldom very concerned with the opinions of others. -Mandorallen, Baron of Vo Mandor.
David Eddings
9.
The motive force of history is truth and not lies.
Leon Trotsky
10.
The only work that spiritually purifies us is that which is done without personal motives.
Sri Aurobindo
11.
I have harnessed the cosmic rays and caused them to operate a motive device.
Nikola Tesla
12.
No one is willing to acknowledge a fault in himself when a more agreeable motive can be found for the estrangement of his acquaintances.
Mark Twain
13.
The distance is nothing when one has a motive.
Jane Austen
14.
We must never forget that human motives are generally far more complicated than we are apt to suppose, and that we can very rarely accurately describe the motives of another.
Fyodor Dostoevsky
15.
Glory ought to be the consequence, not the motive of our actions.
Pliny the Younger
16.
See a person's means ... Observe his motives. Examine that in which he rests. How can a person conceal his character?
Confucius
17.
Living en famille provides the strongest motives for rudeness combined with the maximum opportunity for displaying it.
Quentin Crisp
18.
My motive has always been just to be who I am, and play what I love- if that doesn't get me anywhere then at least it wasn't because I tried to be something I'm not.
Ben Howard
21.
It's so easy to become a grumbler, someone who condemns and carps at everything on principle and sees an ulterior motive behind it.
Eric Metaxas
22.
It is when we act freely, for the sake of the action itself rather than for ulterior motives, that we learn to become more than what we were.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
23.
A person who is keen to shake your hand usually has something up his sleeve.
Alec Guinness
24.
One of the deepest motives (as you are aware) in the human beast (so deep that many have failed to detect it) is Alliteration.
Lewis Carroll
25.
Words can be worrisome, poeple complex, motives and manners unclear, grant her the wisdom to choose her path right, free from unkindness and fear.
Neil Gaiman
26.
People have motives and thoughts of which they are unaware.
Albert Ellis
27.
Love provides the motive for obeying the commands of the law, but the law provides specific direction for exercising love.
Jerry Bridges
28.
One cannot live without motives. I have no motives left, and I am living.
Emile M. Cioran
29.
Everybody who talks to a newspaper has a motive. That's just a given. And good reporters always, repeat always, probe to find out what that motive is.
Ben Bradlee
30.
Men who just call to say hello generally have ulterior motives.
Steig Larsson
31.
There is no act, however virtuous, for which ingenuity may not find some bad motive.
Thomas Jefferson
32.
We can never understand other people's motives, nor their furniture.
Mignon McLaughlin
33.
The noblest motive is the public good.
Virgil
34.
When we pray we link ourselves with an inexhaustible motive power.
Alexis Carrel
35.
The directing motive, the end and aim of capitalist production, is to extract the greatest possible amount of surplus value, and consequently to exploit labor-power to the greatest possible extent.
Karl Marx
39.
Everyone has motives. Let's acknowledge that and get on with the interesting part.
Stephen C. Meyer
40.
What we believe to be the motives of our conduct are usually but the pretexts for it.
Miguel de Unamuno
41.
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
42.
In a promise,
what you thought,
and not what you said,
is always to be considered.
Marcus Tullius Cicero
43.
The concessions of the privileged to the unprivileged are seldom brought about by any better motive than the power of the unprivileged to extort them.
John Stuart Mill
44.
Criticism discloses that which it would fain conceal, but conceals that which it professes to disclose; it is therefore, read by the discerning, not to discover the merits of an author, but the motives of his critic.
Charles Caleb Colton
49.
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
50.
We act unbelievingly and disobediently when, for whatever motive, we distort, falsify, or suppress the facts about our life in nature and history.
Karl Barth