Motive Quotes - Page 9

• 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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• Any attention to them (terrorists) on the part of the media, any double-standard interpretation of their motives and results of their activity means nothing but a political and administrative support of terrorist acts

  Vladimir Putin

  Mean, Media, Support

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• Our feelings of separation from God will diminish as we become more childlike before Him. That is not easy in a world where the opinions of other human beings can have such an effect on our motives. But it will help us recognize this truth: God is close to us and aware of us and never hides from His faithful children.

  Henry B. Eyring

  Children, Feelings, Faithful

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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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• Reason, in a strict sense, as meaning the judgment of truth and falsehood, can never, of itself, be any motive to the will, and can have no influence but so far as it touches some passion or affection. Abstract relations of ideas are the object of curiosity, not of volition. And matters of fact, where they are neither good nor evil, where they neither excite desire nor aversion, are totally indifferent, and whether known or unknown, whether mistaken or rightly apprehended, cannot be regarded as any motive to action.

  David Hume

  Truth, Passion, Ideas

  David Hume, Tom L. Beauchamp (2007). “A Dissertation on the Passions: The Natural History of Religion : a Critical Edition”, p.24, Oxford University Press

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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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• ... 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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• You can drive yourself crazy trying to peer into a person's soul--or you can do the sensible thing: ask not what inner motives drive a politician's policy choices but instead whether those choices are good for the country.

  Paul Begala

  Country, Crazy, Choices

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• Single mothers have as much to teach their children as married mothers and as much love to share--maybe more. Yet their motives are often labeled selfish and single-minded--never mind all the babies brought into the world to snag husbands, "save" faltering marriages or produce heirs.

  Anne Cassidy

  Mother, Baby, Children

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• Men sometimes have strange motives for the things they do.

  Michael Reeves

  Motivation, Men, Humanity

  "Fictional character: Matthew Hopkins". "Witchfinder General", www.imdb.com. 1968.

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• Not rarely, and this is especially true of wives and mothers, the motive behind assuming a disproportionate share of work and responsibility is completely unselfish. We want to protect, to spare those of whom we are fond. We forget that, regardless of the motive, the results of such action are almost always destructive and unproductive.

  Hortense Odlum

  Mother, Responsibility, Wife

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• A man may act as his conscience dictates so long as he does not infringe upon the rights of others. That is the spirit of true democracy, and all government by the Priesthood should be actuated by that same high motive.

  David O. McKay

  Men, Rights, Long

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• We no longer live in a post-Christian society, we live in an anti-Christian society, one in which the Christian faith is dismissed or ridiculed and Christians are considered suspect and their motives and behavior berated.

  Josh McDowell

  Christian, Religious, Behavior

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• Love is a far more dangerous motive than dislike.

  Lady Violet

  Love Is, Dangerous, Dislike

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• Listen to others as if they are telling you the truth, ask questions when you aren't clear, and allow others the room to have different feelings than you. No more assigning hidden motives, prejudging and cutting people off before separating fact from fiction.

  Rhonda Britten

  Cutting, People, Feelings

  FaceBook post by Rhonda Britten from Oct 24, 2015

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• State censorship presents itself as a bulwark between society and forces of subversion or moral corruption. To dismiss this account of its own motives by the state as insincere would be a mistake: it is a feature of the paranoid logic of the censoring mentality that virtue ... must be innocent, and therefore, unless protected, vulnerable to the wiles of vice.

  J. M. Coetzee

  Mistake, Vices, Moral Corruption

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• We are not fond of praising, and never praise any one except from interested motives. Praise is a clever, concealed, and delicate flattery, which gratifies in different ways the giver and the receiver. The one takes it as a recompense of his merit, and the other bestows it to display his equity and discernment.

  Francois de La Rochefoucauld

  Clever, Different, Way

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• What society wants is a new motive, not a new cant.

  Thomas B. Macaulay

  Want, Cant

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• I became evil for no reason. I had no motive for my wickedness except wickedness itself. It was foul, and I loved it. I loved the self-destruction, I loved my fall, not the object for which I had fallen but my fall itself. My depraved soul leaped down from your firmament to ruin. I was seeking not to gain anything by shameful means, but shame for its own sake.

  Saint Augustine

  Fall, Mean, Self

  Saint Augustine, Henry Chadwick (2008). “The Confessions”, p.29, Oxford Paperbacks

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