Quotes About Motives

Be cautious in your intercourse with the great; they seldom confer obligations on their inferiors but from interested motives. Friendly they appear as long as it serves their turn, but they will render no assistance in time of actual need.

since no mass murder takes place without its perpetrators alleging that they are acting for the good of mankind, philanthropic sentiment can plainly take a multiplicity of forms.

Flattery may be considered as a mode of companionship, degrading but profitable to him who flatters.

Sometimes people do what they think is for the best, and their intentions are misinterpreted.

Every time I catch myself trying to figure out other people's motives, I'll stop and ask myself: "What did I say or do that prompted the action? Why did I react to it as I did? Does what happened make a major difference to me, or am I making something big out of a trifle?" Leave off that excessive desire of knowing; therein is found much distraction There are many things the knowledge of which is of little or no profit to the soul.

Many are secretly seeking their own ends in what they do, yet know it not.

I don't know why they're doing it. I have to assume that their motives are positive, not negative. But they don't understand the severity of the problem in this state.

You will find in politics that you are much exposed to the attribution of false motive. Never complain and never explain.

But it is worth recalling the almost genocidal class hatreds of many leading liberal-left intellectuals, because they show that the motives of a part of the intelligentsia were anything but honourable. They did not want the welfare state to reward their fellow citizens for what they and their ancestors had suffered. They wanted the welfare state to transform them from brutes into men or women whose company Virginia Woolf could tolerate.

People have their reasons for the damnedest things in my experience.

We secretly know that being seen as nice is the same as being nice in actuality. If you present yourself as a nice person, that becomes the prism for how your other actions are judged. The deeper motives that drive you can only be questioned by those who know you exceptionally well, and (most of the time) not even by them. If you act nice, you're nice.

But here's the thing: He didn't get hung. The man climbed on a wooden watercraft and collided with North America by accident. It doesn't matter what happened afterwards or what his motives were. He found it. It happened. He's what history is. It was his destiny to be that particular man, and it was his destiny to do those specific things.

They would fail. We would always fail. We weren't built to do anything but fail. We had the wrong kind of motives and we couldn't change them. We had a built-in short-sightedness and an inherent selfishness and a self-concern that made it impossible to step out of the little human rut we traveled…

women are so suspicious of any interest that has not some obvious motive behind it, so terribly accustomed to concealment and suppression, that they are off at the flicker of an eye turned observingly in their direction.

When I try to analyze my own cravings, motives, actions and so forth, I surrender to a sort of retrospective imagination which feeds the analytic faculty with boundless alternatives and which causes each visualized route to fork and re-fork without end in the maddeningly complex prospect of my past.

In life, as in chess, it is always better to analyze one's motives and intentions.

When I try to analyze my own cravings, motives, actions and so forth, I surrender to a sort of retrospective imagination which feeds the analytic faculty with boundless alternatives and which causes each visualized route to fork and re-fork without end in the maddeningly complex prospect of my past. I am convinced, however, that in a certain magic and fateful way Lolita began with Annabel.

Tayla's eyes narrowed into slits, as if she questioned Gem's motives. "I'm not sure I trust you." "I don't trust you either," Gem shot back. "So where does that leave us?" "It leaves you in what's called a family, girls," Wraith drawled. "Get over it.

I couldn't be happier that President Bush has stood up for having served in the National Guard, because I can finally put an end to all those who questioned my motives for enlisting in the Army Reserve at the height of the Vietnam War.

Sometimes people do things that are complicated. For complicated reasons.

There was a long history of children taken, the pretexts different but the reasons the same.

Generosity is a willingness to give, to open without philosophical or pious or religious motives, just simply doing what is required at any moment in any situation, not being afraid to receive anything.

There is some self-interest behind every friendship. There is no friendship without self-interests. This is a bitter truth.

Our very best friends have a tincture of jealousy even in their friendship; and when they hear us praised by others, will ascribe it to sinister and interested motives if they can.