Motiveless Quotes & Sayings

Ahhhh ... organic and rich like good soil ... makes me want to listen and hear it grow.
the songs are honest and dimensional. it's music to my ears. — Amy Ray

Some people with Tourette's have flinging tics- sudden, seemingly motiveless urges or compulsions to throw objects ... (I see somewhat similar flinging behaviors- though not tics- in my two year old godson, now in a stage of primal antinomianism and anarchy) — Oliver Sacks

The New York Times, baffled by Delaware's obstinacy, tried to argue the state into change in an 1867 editorial. If it had previously existed in [the convicted person's] bosom a spark of self-respect this exposure to public shame utterly extinguishes it. Without the hope that springs eternal in the human breast, without some desire to reform and become a good citizen, and the feeling that such a thing is possible, no criminal can ever return to honorable courses. The boy of eighteen who is whipped at New Castle [a Delaware whipping post] for larceny is in nine cases out of ten ruined. With his self-respect destroyed and the taunt and sneer of public disgrace branded upon his forehead, he feels himself lost and abandoned by his fellows. - QUOTED IN ROBERT GRAHAM CALDWELL, Red Hannah: Delaware's Whipping Post — Jon Ronson

Steve Wozniak literally one of the sweetest guys. And that was kind of the thing I had to reconcile: how do I try to do this guy's sweetness justice in some capacity when most of the things I'm doing in the movie are pretty confrontational, and pretty argumentative. — Seth Rogen

I ago's soliloquy
the motive-hunting of a motiveless malignity
how awful it is! — Samuel Taylor Coleridge

I don't do a lot of reflecting. I'm usually about getting on with it. — Aidan Gillen

Parents should be completely dull and ordinary and predictable. You want their relationship to be stable and incredibly boring, as though you would kill yourself if you had to be in that marriage. Neither — Meg Wolitzer

Since I am a loyal American, I am not supposed to tell you why this has taken place, but then it is not usual for us to examine why anything happens; we simply accuse others of motiveless malignity. "We are good," G.W. proclaims, "They are evil," which wraps that one up in a neat package. Later, Bush himself put, as it were, the bow on the package in an address to a joint session of Congress where he shared with them - as well as with the rest of us somewhere over the Beltway - his profound knowledge of Islam's wiles and ways: "They hate what they see right here in this Chamber." I suspect a million Americans nodded sadly in front of their TV sets. "Their leaders are self-appointed. They hate our freedoms, our freedom of religion, our freedom of speech, our freedom to vote and assemble and disagree with each other." At this plangent moment what American's gorge did not rise like a Florida chad to the bait? — Gore Vidal

I've reached that final moment of editing a book - the one where the text manifests as a living breathing person and starts slugging me in the face. — Richard Due

On evenings, I spent the entire study period reading....
From that time on, the world began to broaden around me, beyond any tangible limits.
The world, as portrayed in those works destined for young people, was divided in two: an ordinary, everyday world, brutal and unresponding to desires, and a spacious, logical world, about all kind, interesting and desirable.
Wasn't the very act of reading a pleasure more substantial than that of playing or eating, for instance, even when one was starved? — Joseph Zobel

That's the problem - our lives have stopped and the world keeps going round. — Delphine De Vigan

My must-have hair products are Phyto silk spray and Kusco-Murphy setting lotion. — Johanna Braddy

Even winning means nothing. We win because it's an insult to lose. — Brent Weeks

Coleridge's description of Iago's actions as "motiveless malignancy" applies in some degree to all the Shakespearian villains. The adjective motiveless means, firstly, that the tangible gains, if any, are clearly not the principal motive, and, secondly, that the motive is not the desire for personal revenge upon another for a personal injury. Iago himself proffers two reasons for wishing to injure Othello and Cassio. He tells Roderigo that, in appointing Cassio to be his lieutenant, Othello has treated him unjustly, in which conversation he talks like the conventional Elizabethan malcontent. In his soliloquies with himself, he refers to his suspicion that both Othello and Cassio have made him a cuckold, and here he talks like the conventional jealous husband who desires revenge. But there are, I believe, insuperable objections to taking these reasons, as some critics have done, at their face value. — W. H. Auden

Briefly, then, life, to the pessimist, is a motiveless desire, a constant pain and continued struggle, followed by death, and so on, in secula seculorum, until the planet's crust crumbles to dust. — Edgar Saltus

Marasi had abandoned aspirations toward politics in her youth, and had recently abandoned the solicitors as well. The thing was, those professions had one important flaw: They were populated entirely with attorneys and politicians. — Brandon Sanderson