Motive Quotes

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.

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.

It's motive alone which gives character to the actions of men.

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.

My great crime in the world is blunder I will get into scrapes without intention or any bad motive.

Patriotism is an ephemeral motive that scarcely ever outlasts the particular threat to society that aroused it.

I believe absolutely in love being the central motive force of the universe.

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.

We want deeper sincerity of motive, a greater courage in speech and earnestness in action.

There are a lot of people who are doing wonderful things, quietly, with no motive of greed, or hostility toward other people, or delusions of superiority.

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.

To withdraw myself from myself has ever been my sole, my entire, my sincere motive in scribbling at all.

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.

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.

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.

Do not ever say that the desire to "do good" by force is a good motive. Neither power-lust nor stupidity are good motives.

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.

The people, and the people alone, are the motive force in the making of world history.

The motive power of democracy is love.

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.

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

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.

We are all selfish and I no more trust myself than others with a good motive.

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.

I think the motive is to establish in federal law the personhood from conception forward and try and alter the Constitution through statute.

Cruelty, like every other vice, requires no motive outside of itself; it only requires opportunity.

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.

What appeared to the earlier physicists to be the constant quantity of heat is nothing more than the whole motive power of the motion of heat, which remains constant so long as it is not transformed into other forms of work, or results afresh from them.

That he delights in the misery of others no man will confess, and yet what other motive can make a father cruel?

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.