How working for the wrong motives poisons our creativity and warps our ideas of success and failure.
The greatest cause of evil included all human motives in one giant paradox. Good and bad were so inextricably mixed that we couldn't make them out; bad seemed to lead to good, and good motives led to bad. The paradox is that evil comes from man's urge to heroic victory over evil.
Since the end of the nineteenth century, if not earlier, presidents have misled the public about their motives and their intentions in going to war.
Never question another man's motive. His wisdom, yes, but not his motives.
The history of all times and nations teaches us that exactly in the naïve, unshakable belief, furnished by religion in active life of believers, originate the most intense motives for the most significant creative performance, not only in the field of arts and sciences but also in politics.
I've learned that the universe doesn't care what our motives are, only our actions. So we should do things that will bring about good, even if there is an element of selfishness involved. Like the kids at my school might join the Key Club or Future Buisness Leaders of America, because it's a social thing and looks good on their record, not because they really want to volunteer at the nursing home. But the people at the nursing home still benefit from it, so it's better that the kids do it than not do it. And if they never did it, then they wouldn't find out that they actually liked it.
I have always examined closely the motives of any group for which I am asked to raise money.
Rationalization is a cover-up, a process of providing one's emotions with a false identity, of giving them spurious explanations and justifications - in order to hide one's motives, not just from others, but primarily from oneself. The price of rationalizing is the hampering, the distortion, and, ultimately, the destruction of one's cognitive faculty. Rationalization is a process not of perceiving reality, but of attempting to make reality fit one's emotions.
Every woman is supposed to have the same set of motives, or else to be a monster.
Gods tend to be selfish. Even when they're helpful, they always have their own motives. That's why you have to be careful about trusting them.
sacrifice' was often a cloak for many actions that did not always stem from the highest motives.
The fear of punishment may be necessary to the suppression of vice; but it also suspends the finer motives of virtue.
This is the constitutional limitation of man's knowledge and interests, the fact that he cannot know more than a tiny part of the whole of society and that therefore all that can enter into his motives are the immediate effects which his actions will have in the sphere he knows.
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. There is no doubt that the leaders of the creative artists of the last 50 years concentrated their efforts mainly on eliminating that distance.
I'm always suspicious of people, especially being in a weird realm of people kind of knowing me. . . and not knowing what people's motives might be.
All impediments in fancy's course Are motives of more fancy.
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.
I'm realising my dream of owning a top football club. Some will doubt my motives, others will think I'm crazy.
There is no music that can't be used politically, but the motives behind the creation of that music can be non-political.
Men sometimes have strange motives for the things they do.