Motives quotes:

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Motives reveal why we do what we do, which is actually more important to God than what we're doing. -- Joyce Meyer
Motives are causes experienced from within. -- Arthur Schopenhauer
Motives by excess reverse their very nature and instead of exciting, stun and stupefy the mind. -- Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Motives are better than actions. Men drift into crime. Of evil they do more than they contemplate, and of good they contemplate more than they do. -- Christian Nestell Bovee
The moment there is suspicion about a person's motives, everything he does becomes tainted. -- Mahatma Gandhi
Whenever a man does a thoroughly stupid thing, it is always from the noblest motives. -- Oscar Wilde
People's behavior makes sense if you think about it in terms of their goals, needs, and motives. -- Thomas Mann
Look at the means which a man employs, consider his motives, observe his pleasures. A man simply cannot conceal himself! -- Confucius
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
Any actor who judges his character is a fool - for every role you play you've got to absorb that character's motives and justifications. -- Alan Rickman
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
A moral being is one who is capable of reflecting on his past actions and their motives - of approving of some and disapproving of others. -- Charles Darwin
Many of our deepest motives come, not from an adult logic of how things work in the world, but out of something that is frozen from childhood. -- Kazuo Ishiguro
Do I get up every morning and ask: am I doing the things that I believe in and am I doing them for the best possible motives? Yes. Unambiguously yes. -- Nick Clegg
But behavior in the human being is sometimes a defense, a way of concealing motives and thoughts, as language can be a way of hiding your thoughts and preventing communication. -- Abraham Maslow
Heroes are those who can somehow resist the power of the situation and act out of noble motives, or behave in ways that do not demean others when they easily can. -- Philip Zimbardo
Every diminution of the public burdens arising from taxation gives to individual enterprise increased power and furnishes to all the members of our happy confederacy new motives for patriotic affection and support. -- Andrew Jackson
In 'Diary,' the motto really is: 'Where Do You Get Your Inspiration?' It coaches us to be aware of our motives and not just be a reaction to the circumstances around us. -- Chuck Palahniuk
A lot of times people's main motives and plan in life is to hurt as many people as they can, but I think there's enough good people that help make the world a good place. -- Tina Yothers
Psychopaths view any social exchange as a 'feeding opportunity,' a contest or a test of wills in which there can be only one winner. Their motives are to manipulate and take, ruthlessly and without remorse. -- Robert D. Hare
I know how easy it is for some minds to glide along with the current of popular opinion, where influence, respectability, and all those motives which tend to seduce the human heart are brought to bear. -- Benjamin F. Wade
Our souls may lose their peace and even disturb other people's, if we are always criticizing trivial actions - which often are not real defects at all, but we construe them wrongly through our ignorance of their motives. -- Saint Teresa of Avila
Bob Dylan has always sealed his decisions with the unexplainable. His motives for withholding the release of the magnificent 'Basement Tapes' will be as forever obscure as Brian Wilson's reasons for the destruction of the tapes for 'Smile.' -- Jon Landau
The motives of these parents vary, many parents don't like the curriculum being taught to their kids, or are wary of the threat of peer pressure or the presence of drugs or violence lurking in too many of our schools today. -- Ernest Istook
It is the greatest scam in history. I am amazed, appalled and highly offended by it. Global Warming; It is a scam. Some dastardly scientists with environmental and political motives manipulated long term scientific data to create an illusion of rapid global warming. -- John Coleman
The moment we begin to fear the opinions of others and hesitate to tell the truth that is in us, and from motives of policy are silent when we should speak, the divine floods of light and life no longer flow into our souls. -- Elizabeth Cady Stanton
When any government, or any church for that matter, undertakes to say to its subjects, This you may not read, this you must not see, this you are forbidden to know, the end result is tyranny and oppression no matter how holy the motives. -- Robert A. Heinlein
Most of the evil of the world comes about not out of evil motives, but somebody saying 'get with the program, be a team player;' this is what we saw at Enron, this is what we saw in the Nixon administration with their scandal. -- Philip Zimbardo
If efforts to do social work are couched in selfish motives, then they will die a premature death. Why would my efforts get politicised? I have values I inherited from my father. He helped many. Anyone, even a postman knocking on our door would get a glass of water and some sweets. -- Sachin Tendulkar
Genuine kindness doesn't have ulterior motives. -- Zero Dean
It's the millenium, motives are incidental. -- Jamie Kennedy
Actions are visible, though motives are secret. -- Samuel Johnson
Pure motives do not insure perfect results. -- Christian Nestell Bovee
Beautiful words are ugly motives best friends. -- Steve Fowler
The eternal ambiguity of human motives and memory. -- Ben Brantley
Our motives and thoughts ultimately influence our actions. -- Dieter F. Uchtdorf
Man sees your actions, but God your motives. -- Thomas a Kempis
Pure motives can never justify impure or violent action. -- Mahatma Gandhi
Magnanimity will not consider the prudence of its motives. -- Luc de Clapiers
We can never understand other people's motives, nor their furniture. -- Mignon McLaughlin
My means are sane, my motives and my object mad. -- Herman Melville
Never judge a man's actions until you know his motives -- Vikas Swarup
Never ascribe to an opponent motives meaner than your own. -- James M. Barrie
Men sometimes have strange motives for the things they do. -- Michael Reeves
People have motives and thoughts of which they are unaware. -- Albert Ellis
Building trust is key to discovering and understanding your buyers' motives. -- Grant Cardone
Women don't require motives that are comprehensible to my intellectual processes. -- Rex Stout
Men who just call to say hello generally have ulterior motives. -- Steig Larsson
I keep renaming my motives, but continue doing the same things. -- Mason Cooley
We must judge of a man's motives from his overt acts. -- Lloyd Kenyon, 1st Baron Kenyon
The motives even of our best actions will not always bear examination. -- Charlotte Lennox
Never question another man's motive. His wisdom, yes, but not his motives. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
Numberless arts appear foolish whose secret motives are most wise and weighty. -- Francois de La Rochefoucauld
The most terrible of motives and the most unanswerable of responses: Because. -- Victor Hugo
The New Testament persistently presses us upward, toward higher motives for being good. -- Philip Yancey
Companies' motives to make profit means they neglect inherent social or moral values. -- Russell Brand
Everyone has motives. Let's acknowledge that and get on with the interesting part. -- Stephen C. Meyer
Behind many acts that are thought ridiculous there lie wise and weighty motives. -- Francois de La Rochefoucauld
Hunger, love, vanity, and fear. There are four great motives of human action. -- William Graham Sumner
Who is sure of their own motives can in confidence advance or retreat. -- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
The value the world sets upon motives is often grossly unjust and inaccurate. -- H. L. Mencken
Great effort from great motives is the best definition of a happy life -- William Ellery Channing
I'm sorry you leftists, you're not the only people whose motives are pure. -- Andrew Breitbart
If you are kind, people may accuse you of ulterior motives. Be kind anyway. -- Mother Teresa
World events are the work of individuals whose motives are often frivolous, even casual. -- Gore Vidal
My motives at a young age were, "I want to be rich and famous". -- Terry Bozzio
You can question somebody's views and their judgment without questioning their motives or patriotism. -- Barack Obama
Man acts from adequate motives relative to his interest, and not on metaphysical speculations. -- Edmund Burke
I am a journalist and have no earthly motives except curiosity and personal vanity. -- Gilbert K. Chesterton
Right motives give pinions to thought, and strength and freedom to speech and action. -- Mary Baker Eddy
The beginning of self-knowledge: recognizing that your motives are the same as other people's. -- Mason Cooley
One cannot live without motives. I have no motives left, and I am living. -- Emile M. Cioran
Good and evil, reward and punishment, are the only motives to a rational creature -- John Locke
No one can expect a majority to be stirred by motives other than ignoble. -- Norman Douglas
I never knew a man who had better motives for all the trouble he caused. -- Graham Greene
When men can hate without risk, their stupidity is easily convinced, the motives supply themselves. -- Louis-Ferdinand Celine
There is no reason why humanity cannot be served equally by weighty and trivial motives. -- Eric Hoffer
A wicked person, swayed by evil motives and evil actions, is described as a demon. -- Sathya Sai Baba
Ready are we all to cry out and ascribe motives when our toes are pinched. -- Abraham Lincoln
The only work that spiritually purifies us is that which is done without personal motives. -- Sri Aurobindo
By creating instinctively in auto mode we can uncover our true motives, our creative drive. -- David Luiz
Education-whether its object be children or adults, individuals or an entire people-consists in creating motives. -- Simone Weil
Before impugning an opponent's motives, even when they legitimately may be impugned, answer his arguments. -- Sidney Hook
If you do good, people will accuse you of selfish ulterior motives. Do good anyway. -- Mother Teresa
Getting down to the nitty-gritty, most people are motivated by unconscious motives most of the time. -- Richard J. Mayer
A man must learn to understand the motives of human beings, their illusions, and their sufferings. -- Albert Einstein
It's your fiction that interests me. Your studies of the interplay of human motives and emotion. -- Isaac Asimov
actions whose motives he cannot understand that is, actions not prompted by the hope of profit. -- Andre Gide
Malice will always find bad motives for good actions. - Shall we therefore never do good? -- Thomas Jefferson
Neither pleasure nor pain should enter as motives when one must do what must be done. -- Julius Evola
Never assume people's motives. It's the easiest way to find yourself upset over nothing or misjudging people -- lecrae
Until we see ourselves from the outside objectively, we will automatically project our motives on other people. -- Stephen R. Covey
The citizens of the United States have peculiar motives to support the energy of their constitutional charters. -- James Madison
Living en famille provides the strongest motives for rudeness combined with the maximum opportunity for displaying it. -- Quentin Crisp
One must have deeper motives and judge everything accordingly, but go on talking like an ordinary person. -- Blaise Pascal
The only treaties that ought to count are those which would effect a settlement between ulterior motives. -- Paul Valery
If the outcome is good, what's the difference between motives that sound good and good, sound motives? -- Laurence J. Peter
Every instance of obedience, from right motives, strengthens us spiritually, whilst every act of disobedience weakens us. -- George Muller
The four great motives for writing prose are sheer egoism, esthetic enthusiasm, historical impulse, and political purpose. -- George Orwell
The greater part of our daily actions are the result of hidden motives which escape our observation. -- Gustave Le Bon
How working for the wrong motives poisons our creativity and warps our ideas of success and failure. -- Ray Bradbury
sacrifice' was often a cloak for many actions that did not always stem from the highest motives. -- Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit
What we believe to be the motives of our conduct are usually but the pretexts for it. -- Miguel de Unamuno
Every woman is supposed to have the same set of motives, or else to be a monster. -- George Eliot
Many men can no more be kept straight by spiritual motives than we can live without policemen. -- Lord Acton
Be careful of selfish motives. You can mistake them for principles and end up dying for them. -- Robert Breault
The young men were born with knives in their brain, a tendency to introversion, self-dissection, anatomizing of motives. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
The secret of every durable ... social system is the recasting of 'functional prerequisites' into behavioral motives for actors. -- Zygmunt Bauman
Prudent men lock up their motives, letting familiars have a key to their hearts, as to their garden. -- William Shenstone
All writers are vain, selfish and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives lies a mystery. -- George Orwell
Your life will be joyful and complete when you have a pure heart and your motives are unsullied. -- Frederick Lindemann, 1st Viscount Cherwell
We would be ashamed of our best behavior if the people knew the motives of our behaving so. -- Victor Hugo
Gaining insight into one's underlying motives, it seems, is more like a belief conversion than a self-discovery process -- Albert Bandura
You have to give everyone ugly motives for everything they do, because ugly motives are all you understand. -- Cassandra Clare
if you want to create art, you'd best have a deep belief in yourself and no ulterior motives. -- Twyla Tharp
One must know ones enemy as he is, not as one, for whatever motives, wishes him to be. -- Eugen Kogon
If you wait until your motives are pure and unselfish before you do something, you will wait forever. -- Timothy Keller
We should often blush at our noblest deeds if the world were to see all their underlying motives. -- Francois de La Rochefoucauld
The ulterior motives with which you absorb and assimilate Evil are not your own but those of Evil. -- Franz Kafka
A common fallacy: to imagine a measure will be easy because we have private motives for desiring it. -- George Eliot

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