Quotes About Motives

I cannot justify my actions. Roldero had said that men must be judged by their deeds, not their motives. I offer such speculation only n the hope that by understanding our motives we may thus control our deeds.

He was an autodidact, and he believed his mind could read the motives and spirit behind any invention. He had immediately invented the pocket shirt, which allowed fuzes and gadgets to be stored easily by a working sapper.

Love is the most subtle form of self-interest.

No woman dares to refuse love without a motive, for nothing is more natural than to yield to love.

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.

91] Cause and effect. One must have deeper motives and judge everything accordingly, but go on talking like an ordinary person.

Nothing stinks like a pile of unpublished writing, which remark I guess shows I still don't have pure motives (oh-it's-such-fun-I-just-can't-stop-who-cares-if-it's-published-or-read) about writing. It is more fun to me, than it was when I used it solely as a love-and-admiration-getting mechanism [...]. But I still want to see it finally ritualized in print.

I realized that searching was my symbol, the emblem of those who go out at night with nothing in mind, the motives of a destroyer of compasses.

Ich gebe nur zu bedenken, daß die meisten Dinge von Wichtigkeit, die jemals geschehen sind, mehr als nur einen Grund hatten.

Remarkable how often there's a good reason that masks the real reason.

Now, now-don't strain that magnificent brain of yours trying to work out my motives-we have a lunatic clank to destroy!

But as important as material self-interest is, human beings are motivated by other things as well, motives that better explain the disparate events of the present. This might be called the politics of resentment. In a wide variety of cases, a political leader has mobilized followers around the perception that the group's dignity had been affronted, disparaged, or otherwise disregarded. This resentment engenders demands for public recognition of the dignity of the group in question.

We should often be ashamed of our finest actions if the world understood our motives.

When a fellow says it hain't the money but the principle o' the thing, it's th' money.

Unlike so many, we do not peddle the Word of God for profit." —Paul of Tarsus in 2 Corinthians 2:17, NIV

Power is all around us, continuously confirmed and contested, and perceived with great accuracy. But social scientists, politicians, and even laypeople treat it like a hot potato. We prefer to cover up underlying motives. Anyone who, like Machiavelli, breaks the spell by calling it like it is, risks his reputation. No one wants to be called "Machiavellian," even though most of us are.

motives are entirely new. One paradox

She still doesn't trust my motives?" He was grinning now.

None of us has ever seen a motive. Therefore, we don't know we can't do anything more than suspect what inspires the action of another. For this good and valid reason, we're told not to judge. Tragedy is that our attention centers on what people are not, rather than on what they are and who they might become.

Good intentions that are not clothed in reason lead to greater disasters than those actions built on ill will or stupidity.

She was a plain-faced old woman, without graces and without any great elegance, but with an extreme respect for her own motives. She was usually prepared to explain these—when the explanation was asked as a favour; and in such a case they proved totally different from those that had been attributed to her

the high brutality of good intentions ...

All my means are sane, my motive and my object mad.

I think I can see a little into the springs and motives which being cunningly presented to me under various disguises, induced me to set about performing the part I did, besides cajoling me into the delusion that it was a choice resulting from my own unbiased freewill and discriminating judgment.