Motive Quotes - Page 8

• The whole plan of extermination was nothing less than a cold blooded, calculated political measure, having for its object the annihilation of a superior element in the population, which might prove troublesome, and to this must be added the motive of greed.

  Fridtjof Nansen

  Greed, Political, Might

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• Personalities are like impressionistic paintings. At a distance, each person is 'all of a piece'; up close, each is a bewildering complexity of moods, cognitions, and motives.

  Theodore Millon

  Distance, Personality, Pieces

  Theodore Millon, Roger Dale Davis (1996). “Disorders of personality: DSM-IV and beyond”, Wiley

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• Love is the spirit that motivates the artist's journey. The love may sublime, raw, obsessive, passionate, awful. or thrilling, but whatever its quality, it's a powerful motive in the artist's life.

  Eric Maisel

  Powerful, Artist, Journey

  Eric Maisel (2010). “Creativity for Life: Practical Advice on the Artist's Personality, and Career from America's Foremost Creativity Coach”, p.26, New World Library

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• The ability to discern the thoughts and motives of your heart (especially when experiencing intense emotion) is an essential skill for the believer. Recognizing thoughts and imaginations of the heart is a prerequisite of bringing them 'captive to the obedience of Christ'.

  Lou Priolo

  Heart, Skills, Imagination

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• ... we are most of us brought up in the notion that the highest motive for not doing a wrong is something irrespective of the beings who would suffer the wrong.

  George Eliot

  Suffering, Morality, Notion

  George Eliot (2005). “Four Novels of George Eliot”, p.538, Wordsworth Editions

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• The parallel between antifeminism and race prejudice is striking. The same underlying motives appear to be at work, namely fear, jealousy, feelings of insecurity, fear of economic competition, guilt feelings, and the like. Many of the leaders of the feminist movement in the nineteenth-century United States clearly understood the similarity of the motives at work in antifeminism and race discrimination and associated themselves with the anti slavery movement.

  Ashley Montagu

  Race, Racism, Feminist

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• Christian morality (so called) has all the characters of a reaction.... In its horror of sensuality, it made an idol of asceticism, which has been gradually compromised away into one of legality. It holds out the hope of heaven and the threat of hell, as the appointed and appropriate motives to a virtuous life - in this falling far below the best of the ancients, and doing what lies in it to give to human morality an essentially selfish character.... It is essentially a doctrine of passive obedience; it inculcates submission to all authorities found established.

  John Stuart Mill

  Christian, Lying, Selfish

  John Stuart Mill (1950). “Utilitarianism, liberty, and representative government”

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• Belief, thus, in the supernatural, great as are the services which it rendered in the early stages of human development, cannot be considered to be any longer required, either for enabling us to know what is right and wrong in social morality, or for supplying us with motives to do right and to abstain from wrong.

  John Stuart Mill

  Atheism, Development, Enabling

  John Stuart Mill (1874). “Nature, the Utility of Religion, and Theism. Being three Essays on Religion. With introductory notice by Helen Taylor”, p.100

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• It is pathetic to observe how lowly the motives are that religion, even the highest, attributes to the deity... To be given the best morsel, to be remembered, to be praised, to be obeyed blindly and punctiliously - these have been thought points of honor with the gods.

  George Santayana

  Honor, Atheism, Deities

  George Santayana (1934). “Little essays drawn from the writings of George Santayana”, p.54, Рипол Классик

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• Now that Stevenson is dead I can think of but one English- speaking author who is really keeping his self-respect and sticking forperfection. Of course I refer to that mighty master of language and keen student of human actions and motives, Henry James.

  Willa Cather

  Thinking, Self, Action

  Willa Cather (2014). “A Collection of Stories, Reviews and Essays”, p.196, Simon and Schuster

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• Economists talk about profit motive, but nothing motivates modern man more than a chance to avoid taxes!

  Peter Drucker

  Men, Chance, Modern

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• In using the strong hand, as now compelled to do, the government has a difficult duty to perform. At the very best, it will by turns do both too little and too much. It can properly have no motive of revenge, no purpose to punish merely for punishment's sake. While we must, by all available means, prevent the overthrow of the government, we should avoid planting and cultivating too many thorns in the bosom of society.

  Abraham Lincoln

  Strong, Revenge, Mean

  Abraham Lincoln (1922). “Abraham Lincoln; Complete Works, Comprising His Speeches, Letters, State Papers, and Miscellaneous Writings”

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• I agree with Schopenhauer that one of the most powerful motives that attracts people to science and art is the longing to escape from everyday life.

  Albert Einstein

  Life, Art, Powerful

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• You will perceive by my preaching that I am growing old: it is the privilege of years, and I am sure you will pardon it from the purity of it's motives.

  Thomas Jefferson

  Years, Age, Growing

  Thomas Jefferson, Lyman Henry Butterfield (1954). “The Papers of Thomas Jefferson: 1 November, 1785 to 22 June, 1786”

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• The good diarist writes either for himself alone or for a posterity so distant that it can safely hear every secret and justly weigh every motive. For such an audience there is need neither of affectation nor of restraint. Sincerity is what they ask, detail, and volume; skill with the pen comes in conveniently, but brilliance is not necessary; genius is a hindrance even; and should you know your business and do it manfully, posterity will let you off mixing with great men, reporting famous affairs, or having lain with the first ladies in the land.

  Virginia Woolf

  Writing, Men, Land

  Virginia Woolf (1967). “Collected essays”

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• To take pride in a library kills it. Then, its motive power shifts over to the critical if admiring visitor, and apologies are necessary and acceptable and the fat is in the fire.

  Carolyn Wells

  Apology, Pride, Fire

  Carolyn Wells (1937). “The Rest of My Life”

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• When shallow critics denounce the profit motive inherent in our system of private enterprise, they ignore the fact that it is an economic support of every human right we possess and without it, all rights would disappear.

  Dwight D. Eisenhower

  Rights, Support, Facts

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• Each instance of sexual harassment has to be judged on its merits. Facts, timing, motives, credibility: all must be considered before we make up our own minds what to believe.

  Anna Quindlen

  Believe, Mind, Merit

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• When one has once accepted and absorbed Evil, it no longer demands the unfitness of the means. The ulterior motives with which youabsorb and assimilate Evil are not your own but those of Evil.... Evil is whatever distracts. Evil knows of the Good, but Good does not know of Evil. Knowledge of oneself is something only Evil has. One means that Evil has is the dialogue.... One cannot pay Evil in installments--and one always keeps on trying to.

  Franz Kafka

  Mean, Evil, Trying

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• Poetry, at all times, exercises two distinct functions: it may reveal, it may unveil to every eye, the ideal aspects of common thingsor it may actually add to the number of motives poetic and uncommon in themselves, by the imaginative creation of things that are ideal from their very birth.

  Walter Pater

  Eye, Creativity, Exercise

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• ... so long as woman labors to second man's endeavors and exalt his sex above her own, her virtues pass unquestioned; but when shedares to demand rights and privileges for herself, her motives, manners, dress, personal appearance, and character are subjects for ridicule and detraction.

  Elizabeth Cady Stanton

  Sex, Character, Men

  Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1898). “Eighty Years and More: Reminiscences, 1815-1897”, p.241, UPNE

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• An action is essentially good if the motive of the agent be good, regardless of the consequences.

  Immanuel Kant

  Agents, Action, Goodness

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• ... the loss of belief in future states is politically, though certainly not spiritually, the most significant distinction betweenour present period and the centuries before. And this loss is definite. For no matter how religious our world may turn again, or how much authentic faith still exists in it, or how deeply our moral values may be rooted in our religious systems, the fear of hell is no longer among the motives which would prevent or stimulate the actions of a majority.

  Hannah Arendt

  Religious, Loss, Afterlife

  Hannah Arendt (1968). “Between past and future: eight exercises in political thought”, Viking Adult

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• The private motives of scientists are not the trend of science. The trend of science is made by the needs of society: navigation before the eighteenth century, manufacture thereafter; and in our age I believe the liberation of personality. Whatever the part which scientists like to act, or for that matter which painters like to dress, science shares the aims of our society just as art does.

  Jacob Bronowski

  Art, Believe, Personality

  Jacob Bronowski (2011). “The Common Sense of Science”, p.99, Faber & Faber

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• The proper office of religion is to regulate the heart of men, humanize their conduct, infuse the spirit of temperance, order, andobedience; and as its operation is silent, and only enforces the motives of morality and justice, it is in danger of being overlooked, and confounded with these other motives.

  David Hume

  Heart, Men, Order

  David Hume, John Charles Addison Gaskin (1998). “Dialogues and Natural History of Religion”, p.122, Oxford University Press, USA

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