Quotes About Motive

The essence of dietrologia is that it dismisses the notion that anyone could act purely for reasons of moral conviction.

How good would a Good Samaritan be, if a Good Samaritan would only intend to do good?

but from their regard to their own interest.

The basic need of the creator is independence. The reasoning mind cannot work under any form of compulsion. It cannot be curbed, sacrificed or subordinated to any consideration whatsoever. It demands total independence in function and in motive.

Every major horror of history was committed in the name of an altruistic motive. Has any act of selfishness ever equaled the carnage perpetrated by disciples of altruism?

Do not ever say that the desire to 'do good' by force is a good motive. Neither power-lust nor stupidity are good motives.

It's how I figured out what you're actually facing.  But before I prove I'm actually useful here, why don't you tell me why the man who used it has to die?

I don't think he hates in the way we understand it. Or for that matter, that he loves. He wants to manipulate everything he comes upon, to change it with his will. And since tearing down is easier than building, that's what he does most often.

He never does a proper thing without giving an improper reason for it.

And yet the hope of this paradise had not been enough to save him from a course which shut him out of it forever. Instead of keeping fast hold of the strong silken rope by which Nancy would have drawn him safe to the green banks where it was easy to step firmly, he had let himself be dragged back into the mud and slime, in which it was useless to struggle. He had made his ties for himself which robbed him of all wholesome motive and were a constant exasperation.

We must not inquire too curiously into motives," he interposed, in his measured way. "Miss Brooke knows that they are apt to become feeble in the utterance: the aroma is mixed with the grosser air. We must keep the germinating grain away from the light.

Evidence of defendants' lavish lifestyles is often used to provide a motive for fraud. Jurors sometimes wonder why an executive making tens of millions of dollars would cheat to make even more. Evidence of habitual gluttony helps provide the answer.

Everything we do, we do for a reason.

Any one can get angry—that is easy—or give or spend money; but to do this to the right person, to the right extent, at the right time, with the right motive, and in the right way, that is not for every one, nor is it easy.

All human actions have one or more of these seven causes; chance, nature, compulsion, habit, reason, passion, and desire.

think that it is most probable that Beddoes, pushed to desperation and believing himself to have been already betrayed, had revenged himself upon Hudson, and had fled from the country with as much money as he could lay his hands on. Those are the facts of the case, Doctor, and if they are of any use to your

But how could you guess what the motive was?

In many criminals, especially youthful ones, it is possible to detect a very powerful sense of guilt which existed before the crime, and is therefore not its result but its motive. It is as if it was a relief to be able to fasten this unconscious sense of guilt on to something real and immediate.

Every act should be considered from the point of view not of its object but of its impulsion. The question is not 'What is the aim?' It is 'What is the origin?

The larger crimes are apt to be the simpler, for the bigger the crime, the more obvious, as a rule, is the motive.

Life always take on the character of its motive.

Few people ever kill for the right reasons.

Don't Copy What Someone Is Doing, Copy What God Wants You To Do.

A man generally has two reasons for doing a thing.