if you want to create art, you'd best have a deep belief in yourself and no ulterior motives.
Pure motives can never justify impure or violent action.
A relationship with Christ changes your heart. It's not about your head. It changes your heart. Jesus comes to live in your heart, and even if a person does good works, but they do them without Christ, most of the time, their motives are wrong for why they do them.
Beware of anyone who calls you bad names merely for asking honest questions. Beware of anyone who insists on reframing your sincere curiosity as a character defect. Beware of anyone who questions your motives while ignoring your facts. When someone calls you bad names merely for asking questions, it suggests they know the answer but are terrified to admit it.
Education-whether its object be children or adults, individuals or an entire people-consists in creating motives.
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.
Ready are we all to cry out and ascribe motives when our toes are pinched.
Great effort from great motives is the best definition of a happy life
We would be ashamed of our best behavior if the people knew the motives of our behaving so.
One of the most arrogant undertakings, to my mind, is to write the biography of a man which pretends to go beyond external facts and gives the inmost motives. One of the most mendacious is autobiography.
Motives are causes experienced from within.
Now that Stevenson is dead I can think of but one English- speaking author who is really keeping his self-respect and sticking forperfection. Of course I refer to that mighty master of language and keen student of human actions and motives, Henry James.
It is more important to understand the ground of your own behavior than to understand the motives of another.
I am convinced that the majority of people would be generous from selfish motives, if they had the opportunity.
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.
With the exception of the instinct of self-preservation, the propensity for emulation is probably the strongest and most alert and persistent of the economic motives proper. In an industrial community this propensity for emulation expresses itself in pecuniary emulation; and this, so far as regards the Western civilized communities of the present, is virtually equivalent to saying that it expresses itself in some form of conspicuous waste.
If the outcome is good, what's the difference between motives that sound good and good, sound motives?
We can at least try to understand our own motives, passions, and prejudices, so as to be conscious of what we are doing when we apeal to those of others. This is very difficult, because our own prejudice and emotional bias always seems to us so rational.
No period of history has ever been great or ever can be that does not act on some sort of high, idealistic motives, and idealism in our time has been shoved aside, and we are paying the penalty for it.
Malice will always find bad motives for good actions. - Shall we therefore never do good?
