Too great a preoccupation with motives (especially one's own motive) is liable to lead to too little concern for consequences.
All impediments in fancy's course Are motives of more fancy.
There is no reason why humanity cannot be served equally by weighty and trivial motives.
The weak are not a noble breed. Their sublime deeds of faith, daring, and self-sacrifice usually spring from questionable motives. The weak hate not wickedness but weakness; and one instance of their hatred of weakness is hatred of self. All the passionate pursuits of the weak are in some degree a striving to escape, blur, or disguise an unwanted self. It is a striving shot through with malice, envy, self-deception, and a host of petty impulses; yet it often culminates in superb achievements.
The four great motives for writing prose are sheer egoism, esthetic enthusiasm, historical impulse, and political purpose.
Exile, for no other motive than ease, would be the last defeat, with no seed of future victory in it.
Your life will be joyful and complete when you have a pure heart and your motives are unsullied.
Be fair. Don't present your version of the truth to others. Lose your ulterior motives! Be accurate and pure in your presentation of the way, and you will become the way.
The psychic does not have much to do with channeling. All you are doing is getting information from a source that may or may not be accurate and may or may not have underlying motives.
White Americans must be made to understand the basic motives underlying Negro demonstrations. Many pent-up resentments and latent frustrations are boiling inside the Negro, and he must release them. It is not a threat but a fact of history that if an oppressed people's pent-up emotions are not nonviolently released, they will be violently released.
Practically everything I did as an experiment while I was working on the book made me feel cold, angry, and decidedly peculiar. Clinical. Because I wasn't acting from the motives people usually work from: to feel good, to have fun, to make something last.
It is not difficult to be a revolutionary when revolution has already broken out and is in spate, when all people are joining the revolution just because they are carried away, because it is the vogue, and sometimes even from careerist motives. It is far more difficult--and far more precious--to be a revolutionary when the conditions for direct, open, really mass and really revolutionary struggle do not yet exist.
A wise Government seeks to provide the opportunity through which the best of individual achievement can be obtained, while at the same time it seeks to remove such obstruction, such unfairness as springs from selfish human motives.
One of the challenges of any second-term administration is you always lose a certain amount of identification with the Congress, because everybody in the Congress in the first term knows you'll be out there in the next campaign with them, .. Your motives are always a little more suspect when you don't have to face the voters again.
Beautiful words are ugly motives best friends.
Love is the grand motive of the plan of salvation; it is the source of happiness, the ever-renewing spring of healing, the precious fountain of hope. As we extend our hands and hearts toward others in Christlike love, something wonderful happens to us. Our own spirits become healed, more refined, and stronger. We become happier, more peaceful, and more receptive to the whisperings of the Holy Spirit.
Discernment is the son of good judgment and the father of self-control. When mixed with an already clear conscience, the ability to read the true motives of a critic keeps one's conscience both clear and at ease.
Many people in a rather reckless context claim to 'just tell it like it is'. In actuality, nobody really stresses what one says so much as the motive behind what one says; hence, he is merely blowing hot air and detracting from 'what is'.
A little more grace, a motive made pure, a few truths tenderly told, a heart softened, a character subdued, a life consecrated, would restore the right action of the mental mechanism, and make manifest the movement of body and soul in accord with God.
Ah, what a sweetner of toil is love—love to a dear earthly parent, and still more love to Christ. There is no drudgery in the most menial employment where that is the motive power.
To follow implies not only the denying of one's own clarity, investigation, integrity and honesty, but it also implies that your motive in following is reward.
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.
Many ... begin to make converts from motives of charity, but continue to do so from motives of pride. ... Charity is contented with exhortation and example, but pride is not to be so easily satisfied. ... Whenever we find ourselves more inclined to persecute than persuade, we may then be certain that our zeal has more of pride in it than of charity.
The fear of punishment may be necessary to the suppression of vice; but it also suspends the finer motives of virtue.
I imagine you already know that I am much more socialistic in my economic theory than capitalistic. And yet I am not so opposed to capitalism that I have failed to see its relative merits. It started out with a noble and high motive, to block the trade monopolies of nobles, but like most human systems it falls victim to the very thing it was revolting against. So today capitalism has outlived its usefulness. It has brought about a system that takes necessities from the masses to give luxuries to the classes.
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