Quotes About Motives

there occurred to me the simple epitaph which, when I am no more, I intend to have inscribed on my tombstone. It was this: He was a man who acted from the best motives. There is one born every minute.

there occurred to me the simple epitaph which, when I am no more, I intend to have inscribed on my tombstone. It was this: "He was a man who acted from the best motives. There is one born every minute.

The person himself will think of the real reason. You don't need to emphasize that. But all of us, being idealists at heart, like to think of motives that sound good. So, in order to change people, appeal to the nobler motives.

One good way to check our motives when doing something for the Lord is to see how sweet and patient we can remain when it does not go the way we want it to.

people who read literary fiction (as opposed to popular fiction or nonfiction) were better able to detect another person's emotions, and the theory proposed was that literary fiction engages the reader in a process of decoding the characters' thoughts and motives in a way that popular fiction and nonfiction, being less complex, do not.

The true motives of our actions, like the real pipes of an organ, are usually concealed; but the gilded and hollow pretext is pompously placed in the front for show.

Our motives and thoughts ultimately influence our actions.

We judge ourselves mostly by our intentions, but others judge us mostly by our actions.

In every bad situation we have to see Satan's motives behind a person's actions

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.

The strangest of all the doctrines of the cult of competition, in which admittedly there must be losers as well as winners, is that the result of competition is inevitably good for everybody, that altruistic ends may be met by a system without altruistic motives or altruistic means.

of all bad motives none may be worse or more hopeless than fear. Nobody, I think, has ever done good work because of fear. Good work is done by knowing how and by love. Love requires faith, courage, patience, and steadiness, none of which can come from fear.

If he held me in true regard he would not believe such insinuations in my disfavour. A worthy lover should assume one has unanswerable motives for all one does!" "Certainly—

In such cases the motives of the (usually hidden) leaders may be economic, but the result is largely determined by the passions of the mass.

A truth that's told with bad intent Beats all the lies you can invent.

The man who comes with a tale about others has himself an ax to grind.

So we see the complex and contradictory motives that so often lay behind the apparently binary choices made by people in the wake of the rebellion. Indeed, this enforced reductiveness, the obligation to 'take sides', constitutes the coup's first, and most enduring, act of violence.

The utopian desire for an egalitarian society cannot, however, have sprung from any other motive than that of an inability to come to terms with one's own envy, and/or with the supposed envy of one's less well-off fellow men. It must be obvious how such a man, even if only prompted by his unconscious, would carefully evade the phenomenon of envy or try to belittle it!

Few men know how to live. We grow up at random, carrying into mature life the merely animal methods and motives which we had as little children. And it does not occur to us that all this must be changed; that much of it must be reversed; that life is the finest of the Fine Arts; that it has to be learned with life-long patience, and that the years of our pilgrimage are all too short to master it triumphantly.

Historically, alliances had been formed to augment a nation's strength in case of war; as World War I approached, the primary motive for war was to strengthen the alliances.

The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule.

God made man to go by motives, and he will not go without them, any more than a boat without steam or a balloon without gas.

This history of culture will explain to us the motives, the conditions of life, and the thought of the writer or reformer.

Will the freshness, lightheartedness, the need for love, and strength of faith which you have in childhood ever return? What better time than when the two best virtues -- innocent joy and the boundless desire for love -- were the only motives in life?