Quotes about Motive

Devotion to God is the only acceptable motive for actions that are pleasing to God.

Our motive for obedience is just as important, probably more so, to God than the level of our performance. A person who struggles with some persistent sin but does so out of love for God is more pleasing to Him than the person who has no such struggle but is proud of his or her self-control. Of course, the person who obeys from a motive of love will be concerned about his or her performance. There will be a sincere desire and an earnest effort to please God in every area of life.

I maintain that the cosmic religious feeling is the strongest and noblest motive for scientific research.

To say that Christ is the term and motive force of evolution, to say that he manifests himself as 'evolver,' is implicitly to recognize that he becomes attainable in and through the whole process of evolution.

From a moral point of view, there is no excuse for terrorist acts, regardless of the motive or the situation under which they are carried out.

..the establishment of Civil and Religious Liberty was the Motive that induced me to the field of battle.

Dependence is a perpetual call upon humanity, and a greater incitement to tenderness and pity than any other motive whatever.

It is the nature of a business community that it deals with the covert forms of power in economic life and to be insensible to the significance and the complexity of more overt forms of power, even as it is insensible to the motive of the lust for power as an element in human nature.

God is always more interested in why we do something than in what we do. Attitudes count more than achievements.

Watch your motive before God have no other motive in prayer than to know Him.

The believer," says Aquinas, "has sufficient motive for believing, for he is moved by the authority of divine teaching confirmed by miracles and, what is more, by the inward instigation of the divine invitation."

God alone is perfectly and consistently just. We forget; God remembers. We see an action; God sees a motive. This qualifies Him as the best recordkeeper and judge.