Motive Quotes and Motive Sayings

Motive Quotes and Motive Sayings: In life we do things depending on our motives. Your action is always triggered with a motive.

Today we are going to look at a collection of Motive Sayings, Motive Quotes and motive proverbs.

Motive Quotes

We do a lot of things for reasons besides profit motive. We want to leave the world better than we found it.  – Tim Cook

Our motives and thoughts ultimately influence our actions. – Dieter F. Uchtdorf

A man’s motive in the small actions of daily life, like resting a moment on his pitchfork in the sun and listening intently, may be the most important thing about that man.   – Haniel Long

It’s motive alone which gives character to the actions of men. – Jean De La Bruyere

The first step to moving towards achieving your goals is to have a comprehensive understanding of your life purpose. ― Dr Prem Jagyasi

All the motives for murder are covered by four Ls: Love, Lust, Lucre and Loathing. ― P.D. James

The noblest motive is the public good. – Virgil

The motive of fear is the be-all and end-all of religion. – H. L. Mencken

The only motive strong enough to induce men to exercise the self control required by the religion of Jesus is love. – Marion G. Romney

I can hear you preach about freedom, yet your motive that makes me listened. ― Toba Beta

Pure motives can never justify impure or violent action. – Mahatma Gandhi

To exercise some sort of control over others is the secret motive of every selfish person. – Wallace D. Wattles

The right reason will reap the desired result, ― J.R. Rim

The key to motivation is motive. It’s the why. It’s the deeper yes! burning inside that makes it easier to say no to the less important. – Stephen Covey

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. – Henry Ward Beecher

I try to be cool with everybody, but sometimes, everybody just has different personalities, motives, and different characters. – Tyga

Also Read: Short Inspirational Quotes

Motive Sayings

Love provides the motive for obeying the commands of the law, but the law provides specific direction for exercising love.  – Jerry Bridges

The fundamental motive of true teaching is the love that seeks and studies and performs. – Robert Grudin

A wrong motive involves defeat. – Mary Baker Eddy

In general, we do well to let an opponent’s motives alone. We are seldom just to them. Our own motives on such occasions are often worse than those we assail. – W. E. Channing

But if we never acted except when we were certain our motives were pure, we would never act at all. – C.J. Sansom

I have always wanted to kill you, ever since the moment when I learnt of your existence. ― Iris Murdoch

The motive power is the cause of all life. – Leonardo da Vinci

Never ascribe to an opponent motives meaner than your own. – John M. Barrie

An action is essentially good if the motive of the agent be good, regardless of the consequences. – Immanuel Kant

Should we still be friends when it could be more profitable if otherwise? ― Toba Beta

Pure motives do not insure perfect results. – Christian Nestell Bovee

The expectation of intelligent gossip is a powerful motive for serious self-criticism, more powerful than New Year resolutions to improve one’s decision making at work and at home. ― Daniel Kahneman

Self-defense was an accepted motive for murder. ― Farrah Naseem

Motive is never easy. Sometimes it occurs to one only later. – John Hawkes

The motives of mankind are plainer than the motions they produce. ― R.D. Blackmore

How to gain, how to keep, how to recover happiness is in fact for most men at all times the secret motive of all they do, and of all they are willing to endure. – William James

The distance is nothing when one has a motive. – Jane Austen

Motive Quotes and Sayings

Men sometimes have strange motives for the things they do.  – Matthew Hopkins

No motive is pure. No one is good or bad-but a hearty mix of both. And sometimes life actually gives to you by taking away. – Carrie Fisher

Vanity is a motive of immense potency. – Bertrand Russell

People have motives and thoughts of which they are unaware. – Albert Ellis

Life always take on the character of its motive. – J. G. Holland

It is not as much about who you used to be, as it is about who you choose to be. ― Sanhita Baruah

We all remember epochs in our experience when some dear expectation dies, or some new motive is born. ― George Eliot

One of the strongest motives for wishing to work on yourself is the realization that you may die at any moment – only you must first realize this. – G. I. Gurdjieff

We rarely do anything with on single motive. – Paul David Tripp

Every action needs to be prompted by a motive. To know and to will are two operations of the human mind. Discerning, judging, deliberating are acts of the human mind.  – Leonardo da Vinci

It is motive alone that gives real value to the actions of men, and disinterestedness puts the cap to it – Jean De La Bruyere

The true worth of a soul is revealed as much by the motive it attributes to the actions of others as by its own deeds. – John Petit-Senn

Plants are more courageous than almost all human beings: an orange tree would rather die than produce lemons, whereas instead of dying the average person would rather be someone they are not. ― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

No one can expect a majority to be stirred by motives other than ignoble. – Norman Douglas

Discard every self-seeking motive as soon as it is seen, and you need not search for truth; truth will find you.  – Nisargadatta Maharaj

Would you like to know your future? If your answer is yes, think again. Not knowing is the greatest life motivator. So enjoy, endure, survive each moment as it comes to you in its proper sequence — a surprise. ― Vera Nazarian

Never question another man’s motive. His wisdom, yes, but not his motives. ― Dwight D. Eisenhower

A man may plant a tree for a number of reasons. Perhaps he likes trees. Perhaps he wants shelter. Or perhaps he knows that someday he may need the firewood. ― Joanne Harris

More often than not, an inspirational or motivational speaker is someone who makes money from telling us that we can do all of the things that we can do … and pretty much all of the things that we cannot do.― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

Leadership is less about motivating people to act and more about choosing motivated people who act. ― Richie Norton

It’s all about motive. Climbing up and climbing out look the same on the outside. ― Joyce Rachelle

You cannot see a person’s heart, belief or motive unless it identifies itself with an action. ― Brenda Diann Johnson

A craving is the sense that something is missing. It is a desire to change your internal state. This gap between your current state and your desired state provides a reason to act.

Desire is the difference between where you are now and where you want to be in the future. Even the tiniest action is tinged with the motivation to feel differently than you do in the moment. When you binge eat or browse social media, what you really want is not a potato chip or a bunch of likes. What you really want is to feel different. ― James Clear

The moment we begin to fear the opinions of others and hesitate to tell the truth that is in us, and from motives of policy are silent when we should speak, the divine floods of light and life no longer flow into our souls. – Elizabeth Cady Stanton

Our souls may lose their peace and even disturb other people’s, if we are always criticizing trivial actions – which often are not real defects at all, but we construe them wrongly through our ignorance of their motives. – Saint Teresa of Avila

The moment there is suspicion about a person’s motives, everything he does becomes tainted. – Mahatma Gandhi

We would frequently be ashamed of our good deeds if people saw all of the motives that produced them. – Francois de La Rochefoucauld

If efforts to do social work are couched in selfish motives, then they will die a premature death. Why would my efforts get politicised? I have values I inherited from my father. He helped many. Anyone, even a postman knocking on our door would get a glass of water and some sweets. – Sachin Tendulkar

A moral being is one who is capable of reflecting on his past actions and their motives – of approving of some and disapproving of others. – Charles Darwin

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

I must discipline myself. I must be imaginative and create plots, knit motives, probe dialogue – rather than merely trying to record descriptions and sensations. The latter is pointless, without purpose, unless it is later to be synthesized into a story. The latter is also a rather pronounced symptom of an oversensitive and unproductive ego. – Sylvia Plath

Look at the means which a man employs, consider his motives, observe his pleasures. A man simply cannot conceal himself! – Confucius

When you do well, everybody’s after you, and sometimes the motives are legitimate, and sometimes it’s envy and jealousy. – Robert Kraft

Whenever a man does a thoroughly stupid thing, it is always from the noblest motives. – Oscar Wilde

Criticism always seemed to me a lot like police work. You look for clues, fingerprints, motives. You need to construct an airtight case. – Nathaniel Rich

There are so many different ways to lead. The most important thing is to be genuine. To have people around you trust you, trust in what you stand for and who you are. And I think that if people watch you day in and day out and believe in your motives and they believe that you set a high standard for yourself. – Steve Nash

Circumstances of crimes vary. So do motives. And so do prospects for rehabilitation. The number of imponderables makes it impossible to sentence by formula and still sentence justly. – Robert Kennedy

Most of the evil of the world comes about not out of evil motives, but somebody saying ‘get with the program, be a team player;’ this is what we saw at Enron, this is what we saw in the Nixon administration with their scandal. – Philip Zimbardo

We must understand the motives and forces of our time and analyze their structure from three points of view: the material, the functional, and the spiritual. We must make clear in what respects our epoch differs from others and in what respects it is similar. – Ludwig Mies van der Rohe

It is a question of fact, whether the influence of motives be fixed by laws of nature, so that they shall always have the same effect in the same circumstances. – Thomas Reid

Our feelings of separation from God will diminish as we become more childlike before Him. That is not easy in a world where the opinions of other human beings can have such an effect on our motives. But it will help us recognize this truth: God is close to us and aware of us and never hides from His faithful children. – Henry B. Eyring

When any government, or any church for that matter, undertakes to say to its subjects, This you may not read, this you must not see, this you are forbidden to know, the end result is tyranny and oppression no matter how holy the motives. – Robert A. Heinlein

It is the greatest scam in history. I am amazed, appalled and highly offended by it. Global Warming; It is a scam. Some dastardly scientists with environmental and political motives manipulated long term scientific data to create an illusion of rapid global warming. – John Coleman

Americans born since World War II have grown up in a media-saturated environment. From childhood, we have developed a sort of advertising literacy, which combines appreciation for technique with skepticism about motives. We respond to ads with at least as much rhetorical intelligence as we apply to any other form of persuasion. – Virginia Postrel

I used to dig in the garden, and there isn’t anything fantastic or ultradimensional about crab grass… unless you are a SF writer, in which case, pretty soon you’re viewing crabgrass with suspicion. What are its real motives? And who sent it in the first place? The question I always found myself asking was, ‘What is it, really?’ – Philip K. Dick

It is one of the primary motives of modern art that it wants to abolish the distance which the viewer, the consumer, the audience maintain vis-a-vis a work of art. – Hans-Georg Gadamer