Pure motives do not ensure perfect results. [ Bovee ]
Real motives, however seemingly apparent, are still hidden. [ Alfred Mercier ]
All impediments in fancy's course are motives of more fancy. [ William Shakespeare ]
Great effort from great motives is the best definition of a happy life. [ William Ellery Channing ]
We should often be ashamed of our best actions if the world saw the motives which inspire us. [ La Rochefoucauld ]
Motives by excess reverse their very nature, and instead of exciting, stun and stupefy the mind. [ Coleridge ]
Prudent men lock up their motives, letting familiars have a key to their hearts, as to their garden. [ Shenstone ]
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 ]
The pure in heart are slow to credit calumnies, because they hardly comprehend what motives can be inducements to the alleged crimes. [ Jane Porter ]
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 ]
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 ]
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. [ Colton ]
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 ]
Delusive ideas are the motives of the greatest part of mankind, and a heated imagination the power by which their actions are incited. The world in the eye of a philosopher may be said to be a large madhouse. [ Mackenzie ]
The desire of posthumous fame and the dread of posthumous reproach and execration are feelings from the influence of which scarcely any man is perfectly free, and which in many men are powerful and constant motives of action. [ Macaulay ]
The coarsest father gains a new impulse to labor from the moment of his baby's birth; he scarcely sees it when awake, and yet it is with him all the time. Every stroke he strikes is for his child. New social aims, new moral motives, come vaguely up to him. [ T. W. Higginson ]
Two qualities are demanded of a statesman who would direct any great movement of opinion in which he himself takes a part; he must have a complete understanding of the movement itself, and he must be animated by the same motives as those which inspire the movement. [ Lamartine ]
How often in the halls of legislation does eloquence unmask corruption, expose intrigue, and overthrow tyranny! In the cause of mercy it is omnipotent. It is bold in the consciousness of its superiority, fearless and unyielding in the purity of its motives. All opposition it destroys; all power it defies. [ Henry Melville ]
We are not fond of praising, and never praise any one except from interested motives. Praise is a clever, concealed, and delicate flattery, which gratifies in different ways the giver and the receiver. The one takes it as a recompense of his merit, and the other bestows it to display his equity and discernment. [ Rochefoucauld ]
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 ]