Motive Quotes - Page 24

• What time can be more beautiful when the one in which the finest virtues, innocent cheerfulness and indefinable longing for love constitute the sole motives of your life.

  Leo Tolstoy

  Beautiful, Longing, Virtue

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• It is amazing how many people think that they can answer an argument by attributing bad motives to those who disagree with them. Using this kind of reasoning, you can believe or not believe anything about anything, without having to bother to deal with facts or logic.

  Thomas Sowell

  Believe, Thinking, People

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• Charitable endeavour exalts the prestige and the status of the giver. This may sound unduly cynical but as with all philantrophic activity, it is not easy to unravel the mutually reinforcing motives of selflessness and self-interest. All that can safely be said is that most members of the royal family have difficulty distinguishing between concern about society, concern about the social order and concern about what best to do so they can remain at the top of it.

  David Cannadine

  Self, Order, Cynical

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• Always moved by religious motives, the Church has condemned the various forms of Marxist Socialism; and she condemns them today, because it is her permanent right and duty to safeguard men from currents of thought and influence that jeopardize their eternal salvation.

  Pope Pius XI

  Wisdom, Religious, Men

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• Pascal makes no attempt in this most famous argument to show that his Roman Catholicism is true or probably true. The reasons which he suggests for making the recommended bet on his particular faith are reasons in the sense of motives rather than reasons in the sense of grounds. Conceding, if only for the sake of the present argument, that we can have no knowledge here, Pascal tries to justify as prudent a policy of systematic self-persuasion, rather than to provide grounds for thinking that the beliefs recommended are actually true.

  Antony Flew

  Thinking, Self, Atheism

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• The history of all times and nations teaches us that exactly in the naïve, unshakable belief, furnished by religion in active life of believers, originate the most intense motives for the most significant creative performance, not only in the field of arts and sciences but also in politics.

  Max Planck

  Art, Creative, Atheism

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• Men's hearts are being searched...it is a tremendous sifting time, not only of actions but of inner motives. Nothing can escape the all-searching eye of God.

  Frank Bartleman

  Heart, Eye, Men

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• The characteristic of a disciple is not that he does good things, but that he is good in his motives, having been made good by the supernatural grace of God.

  Oswald Chambers

  Grace, Doe, Good Things

  Oswald Chambers (2011). “My Utmost for His Highest Classic Edition”, p.421, Discovery House

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• First of all; Frank was the BOSS. We didn't question any of his motives or decisions at the time.

  Jimmy Carl Black

  Fog, Decision, Boss

  Jimmy Carl Black Interview by Stephen Moore in Munich, Germany, www.stevemoorebooks.com. March 29, 2000.

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• 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

  Heart, Mind, Bears

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• Ardent desire for knowledge, in fact, is the one motive attracting and supporting investigators in their efforts; and just this knowledge, really grasped and yet always flying before them, becomes at once their sole torment and their sole happiness. Those who do not know the torment of the unknown cannot have the joy of discovery which is certainly the liveliest that the mind of man can ever feel.

  Claude Bernard

  Knowledge, Science, Men

  Claude Bernard (2012). “An Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine”, p.239, Courier Corporation

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• To be beneficent when we can is a duty; and besides this, there are many minds so sympathetically constituted that, without any other motive of vanity or self-interest, they find a pleasure in spreading joy around them, and can take delight in the satisfaction of others so far as it is their own work. But I maintain that in such a case an action of this kind, however proper, however amiable it may be, has nevertheless no true moral worth, but is on a level with other inclinations. . . . For the maxim lacks the moral import, namely, that such actions be done from duty, not from inclination.

  Immanuel Kant

  Work, Vanity, Self

  Immanuel Kant (2012). “Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysics of Morals”, p.14, Courier Corporation

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• The ruthless economic exploitation and political oppression of the peasants by the landlord class forced them into numerous uprisings against its rule.... It was the class struggles of the peasants, the peasant uprisings and peasant wars that constituted the real motive force of historical development in Chinese feudal society.

  Mao Zedong

  Real, War, Struggle

  Mao Zedong (2017). “Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung (The Little Red Book) & Other Works”, p.11, Lulu.com

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• Shocking writing is like murder: the questions the jury must decide are the questions of motive and intent.

  E. B. White

  Writing, Murder, Obscenity

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• The horror of Gandhi's murder lies not in the political motives behind it or in its consequences for Indian policy or for the future of non-violence; the horror lies simply in the fact that any man could look into the face of this extraordinary person and deliberately pull a trigger.

  Mary McCarthy

  Lying, Men, Extraordinary Person

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• The wind, as a direct motive power, is wholly inapplicable to a system of machine labour, for during a calm season the whole business of the country would be thrown out of gear. Before the era of steam-engines, windmills were tried for draining mines; but though they were powerful machines, they were very irregular, so that in a long tract of calm weather the mines were drowned, and all the workmen thrown idle.

  William Stanley Jevons

  Country, Powerful, Wind

  William Stanley Jevons (1866). “The coal question: an enquiry concerning the progress of the Nation, and the probable exhaustion of our coal-mines”, p.144

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• Everyone is motivated a little or a lot to do something or nothing. Motivation is the internalized drive toward the dominant thought of the moment. By definition, motivation is "motive in action."

  Denis Waitley

  Motivation, Definitions, Littles

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• There is no act, however virtuous, for which ingenuity may not find some bad motive.

  Thomas Jefferson

  President, May, Virtuous

  Thomas Jefferson, Henry Augustine Washington (1854). “The Writings of Thomas Jefferson: Correspondence, contin”, p.477

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• To truly know God we must long for Him without any other motive than reaching God Himself.

  Aiden Wilson Tozer

  God, Christian, Religious

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• God is His own motive. His love is not drawn out by our loveableness, but wells up, like an artesian spring, from the depths of His nature.

  Alexander MacLaren

  God, Christian, Spring

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• The motive power is the cause of all life.

  Leonardo da Vinci

  Intelligent, Causes

  Leonardo da Vinci (1938). “The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci, Complete”, p.1138, Library of Alexandria

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• Love is the motive, but justice is the instrument.

  Reinhold Niebuhr

  Love Is, Justice, Instruments

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• I suspect it is for one’s self-interest that one looks at one’s surroundings and one’s self. This search is personally born and is indeed my reason and motive for making photographs. The camera is not merely a reflecting pool and the photographs are not exactly the mirror, mirror on the wall that speaks with a twisted tongue. Witness is borne and puzzles come together at the photographic moment which is very simple and complete. The mind-finger presses the release on the silly machine and it stops time and holds what its jaws can encompass and what the light will stain.

  Lee Friedlander

  Wall, Silly, Simple

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• The young men were born with knives in their brain, a tendency to introversion, self-dissection, anatomizing of motives.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Men, Self, Knives

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Illustrated)”, p.2821, Delphi Classics

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• Probability is not about the odds, but about the belief in the existence of an alternative outcome, cause, or motive.

  Nassim Nicholas Taleb

  Odds, Alternatives, Outcomes

  Nassim Nicholas Taleb (2007). “Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets”, p.224, Penguin UK

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