Quotes About Motive

Of course, when you work on a character, you try to understand her. You feel that everything she does has a reason.

At least one reason for trying to live lives that make a difference is that by so living, we hope we will not be forgotten by those who benefit from our trying to make a difference. Yet to try to insure we will not be forgotten too often results in desperate manipulative strategies that are doomed to fail.

If a motive affects me, and I am compelled to act on it because it proves to be the 'strongest' of its kind, then the thought of freedom ceases to have any meaning. How should it matter to me whether I can do a thing or not, if I am forced by the motive to do it?

There are two reasons why a person does something, one that sounds good and the real one.

And whoever it was … was planning a murder.

Only fools and criminals didn't know why they did things.

No game in the world is as tidy and dramatically neat as baseball, with cause and effect, crime and punishment, motive and result, so cleanly defined.

Whether or not anyone could have done it is not what's important. What is important is whether or not anyone would have done it.

I am determinèd to prove a villain

Each human act has countless causes. The author works to reveal these causes.

No one ever hates without a cause....

Every man without passions has within him no principle of action, nor motive to act.

The atmosphere is much too near for dreams. It forces us to action. It is close to us. We are in it and of it. It rouses us both to study and to do. We must know its moods and also its motive forces.

Morse, he knew, had the maddeningly brilliant facility for seeing his way through the dark labyrinths of human motive and human behaviour...

America - a great social and economic experiment, noble in motive and far-reaching in purpose.

So am I! And the only reason I'm in the human world is because Dad wants the stupid crown and you want it and everyone wants it. Well, I don't. It's cursed.

The secret of a great success for which you are at a loss to account is a crime that has never been found out, because it was properly executed.

The ones referred to obliquely and the ones discussed in frank detail. She'd give the police everything they needed to convict her husband. She would say, Here is one possible motive and here is another, because any marriage of that many years has multiple motives for murder. Every police officer and hairdresser knows that.

Killing makes me feel good.

It's, um, you know," I said, feeling exceptionally awkward. "There's something unique about every murder, so you try to see what would make somebody do that.

He just did it for the same reason he does everything else - he felt like it.

Socialism proposes no adequate substitute for the motive of enlightened selfishness that today is at the basis of all human labor and effort, enterprise and new activity.

A benefit consists not in what is done or given, but in the intention of the giver or doer.

Take away the cause, and the effect ceases.