In the motive lies the good or ill. [ Dr. Johnson ]
The noblest motive is the public good. [ Virgil ]
Pure motives do not ensure perfect results. [ Bovee ]
The love of praise
Fills life with fine amenities. Not all
Who live have pleasant tempers, and not all
The gift of gracious manners, or the love
Of nobler motive higher meed than praise. [ J. G. Holland ]
What makes life dreary is the want of motive. [ George Eliot ]
Take away the motive, and you take away the sin. [ Cervantes ]
A good intention clothes itself with sudden power. [ Emerson ]
Love is omnipresent in nature as motive and reward. [ Ralph Waldo Emerson ]
What society wants is a new motive, not a new cant. [ Macaulay ]
For there's nothing we read of in torture's inventions,
Like a well-meaning dunce, with the best of intentions. [ Lowell ]
Real motives, however seemingly apparent, are still hidden. [ Alfred Mercier ]
Who sweeps a room, as for Thy laws, makes that and the action fine. [ George Herbert ]
Selfishness is the grand moving principle of nine-tenths of our actions. [ Rochefoucauld ]
Many actions, like the Rhone, have two sources, - one pure, the other impure. [ Hare ]
All merit ceases the moment we perform an act for the sake of its consequences.
Truly, in this respect we have our reward. [ Wilhelm von Humboldt ]
Take from men ambition and vanity and you will have neither heroes nor patriots. [ Seneca ]
The whole world is put in motion by the wish for riches and the dread of poverty. [ Dr. Johnson ]
In a promise, what you thought, and not what you said, is always to be considered. [ Cicero ]
Whenever a man does a thoroughly stupid thing it is always from the noblest motive. [ Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Grey ]
He who does evil that good may come pays a toll to the devil to let him into heaven. [ Hare ]
The two great movers of the human mind are the desire of good, and the fear of evil. [ Johnson ]
No labor is hard, no time is long, wherein the glory of eternity is the mark we level at. [ Quarles ]
He that does good for good's sake seeks neither praise nor reward, though sure of both at last. [ William Penn ]
However brilliant an action, it should not be esteemed great unless the result of a great motive. [ La Rochefoucauld ]
Prudent men lock up their motives, letting familiars have a key to their hearts, as to their garden. [ Shenstone ]
The mingled incentives which lead to action are often too subtle and lie too deep for us to analyze. [ Lavater ]
If a man speaks or acts with a pure thought, happiness follows him like a shadow that never leaves him. [ Buddha ]
It is motive alone that gives real value to the actions of men, and disinterestedness puts the cap to it. [ Bruyere ]
Act always so that the immediate motive of thy will may become a universal rule for all intelligent beings. [ Kant ]
Let the motive be in the deed, and not in the event. Be not one whose motive for action is the hope of reward. [ Krishna ]
Never fear to bring the sublimest motive to the smallest duty, and the most infinite comfort to the smallest trouble. [ Phillips Brooks ]
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. [ J. Petit-Senn ]
In the eye of that Supreme Being to whom our whole internal frame is uncovered, dispositions hold the place of actions. [ Blair ]
Whatever touches the nerves of motive, whatever shifts man's moral position, is mightier than steam or caloric or lightning. [ Chapin ]
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. [ Beecher ]
We should often have reason to be ashamed of our most brilliant actions if the world could see the motives from which they spring. [ Rochefoucauld ]
Motives are better than actions. Men drift into crime. Of evil they do more than they contemplate, and of good they contemplate more than they do. [ Bovee ]
The impulse to perform a worthy action often springs from our best nature, but is afterwards tainted by the spur of selfishness or sinister interest. [ Emile Souvestre ]
If you seek warmth of affection from a similar motive to that from which cats and dogs and slothful persons hug the fire, you are on the downward road. [ Thoreau ]
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 ]
Vanity is so frequently the apparent motive of advice, that we, for the most part, summon our powers to oppose it without any very accurate inquiry whether it is right. [ Dr. Johnson ]
The difference there is betwixt honor and honesty seems to be chiefly the motive; the mere honest man does that from duty which the man of honor does for the sake of character. [ Shenstone ]
Man, it is not thy works, which are mortal, infinitely little, and the greatest no greater than the least, but only the spirit thou workest in, that can have worth or continuance. [ Carlyle ]
We must not inquire too curiously into motives. 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. [ George Eliot ]
Without some strong motive to the contrary, men united by the pursuit of a clearly defined common aim of irresistible attractiveness naturally coalesce; and since they coalesce naturally, they are clearly right in coalescing and find their advantage in it. [ Matthew Arnold ]
Of him that hopes to be forgiven it is indispensably required that he forgive. It is, therefore, superfluous to urge any other motive. On this great duty eternity is suspended, and to him that refuses to practise it, the throne of mercy is inaccessible, and the Saviour of the world has been born in vain. [ Johnson ]
What if a man save my life with a draught that was prepared to poison me? The providence of the issue does not at all discharge the obliquity of the intent. And the same reason holds good even in religion itself. It is not the incense, or the offering that is acceptable to God, but the purity and devotion of the worshipper. [ Seneca ]
Motives are symptoms of weakness, and supplements for the deficient energy of the living principle, the law within us. Let them then be reserved for those momentous acts and duties in which the strongest and best balanced natures must feel themselves deficient, and where humility no less than prudence prescribes deliberation. [ Coleridge ]
The motives of the best actions will not bear too strict an inquiry. It is allowed that the cause of most actions, good or bad, may be resolved into the love of ourselves; but the self-love of some men inclines them to please others, and the self-love of others is wholly employed in pleasing themselves. This makes the great distinction between virtue and vice. [ Swift ]
The love of flowers seems a naturally implanted passion, without any alloy or debasing object in its motive; we cherish them in youth, we admire them in declining years; but perhaps it is the early flowers of spring that always bring with them the greatest degree of pleasure; and our affections seem to expand at the sight of the first blossom under the sunny wall, or sheltered bank, however humble its race may be. With summer flowers we seem to live, as with our neighbors, in harmony and good order; but spring flowers are cherished as private friendships. [ G. A. Sola ]