Behind every action is a motive. Motives can be purposeful or other times they are unconscious. Here are some quotes about motive that can help understand peoples intentions better.
People’s behavior makes sense if you think about it in terms of their goals, needs, and motives.
Thomas Mann
Every action needs to be prompted by a motive.
Leonardo da Vinci
It’s motive alone which gives character to the actions of men.
Jean de la Bruyere
We are all selfish and I no more trust myself than others with a good motive.
Lord Byron
By annihilating the desires, you annihilate the mind. Every man without passions has within him no principle of action, nor motive to act.
Claude Adrien Helvetius
Cruelty, like every other vice, requires no motive outside of itself; it only requires opportunity.
George Eliot
Getting ahead cannot be the only motive that motivates people. You have to imagine what a good life is.
Henry Giroux
Every creativity has a motive. Either one does it for money, for fame, or for passion. My energies go out for passion.
Varun Dhawan
No one does anything from a single motive.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
I believe absolutely in love being the central motive force of the universe.
Laurence Housan
The overcoming of adversity and, ultimately, denying it the rite of passage, has been a constant and perpetual motive throughout my life.
Heather Mills
People instinctively know the difference between something done with a profit motive and something done with a love motive.
Philip Yancey
A desire of gain is common to mankind, and the general motive to business and industry.
Oliver Ellsworth
I feel that whatever God gives you, happiness or sadness, there is a motive behind it.
Rekha
Nothing in life is without cause and effect. Nothing is merely a shell. Everything has some motive.
Gutzon Borglum
William James
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.
Matthew Hopkins
Men sometimes have strange motives for the things they do.
Carrie Fisher
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.
J. G. Holland
Life always take on the character of its motive.
John Petit-Senn
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.
Bertrand Russell
Vanity is a motive of immense potency.
Virgil
The noblest motive is the public good.
Dieter F. Uchtdorf
Our motives and thoughts ultimately influence our actions.
H. L. Mencken
The motive of fear is the be-all and end-all of religion.
Mahatma Gandhi
Pure motives can never justify impure or violent action.
Christian Nestell Bovee
Pure motives do not insure perfect results.
Wallace D. Wattles
To exercise some sort of control over others is the secret motive of every selfish person.
Albert Ellis
People have motives and thoughts of which they are unaware.
