The light of lights looks always on the motive, not the deed, the shadow of shadows on the deed alone.
William Butler Yeats

The motive power of democracy is love.
Henri Bergson

The people, and the people alone, are the motive force in the making of world history.
Mao Zedong

There are a lot of people who are doing wonderful things, quietly, with no motive of greed, or hostility toward other people, or delusions of superiority.
Charles Kuralt

This part of being a man, changing the way we parent, happens only when we want it to. It changes because we are determined for it to change; and the motive for changing often comes out of wanting to be the kind of parent we didn't have.
Augustus Y. Napier

To withdraw myself from myself has ever been my sole, my entire, my sincere motive in scribbling at all.
Lord Byron

Turning corporations loose and letting the profit motive run amok is not a prescription for a more livable world.
Tom Scholz

We acknowledge but one motive - to follow the truth as we know it, whithersoever it may lead us; but in our heart of hearts we are well assured that the truth which has made us free, will in the end make us glad also.
Mortimer Adler

We are all selfish and I no more trust myself than others with a good motive.
Lord Byron

We want deeper sincerity of motive, a greater courage in speech and earnestness in action.
Sarojini Naidu

What appeared to the earlier physicists to be the constant quantity of heat is nothing more than the whole motive power of the motion of heat, which remains constant so long as it is not transformed into other forms of work, or results afresh from them.
Hermann von Helmholtz

What makes life dreary is the want of a motive.
George Eliot

When the severity of the law is to be softened, let pity, not bribes, be the motive.
Miguel de Cervantes

You will find in politics that you are much exposed to the attribution of false motive. Never complain and never explain.
Stanley Baldwin