“No woman has less temptation to seek matrimony from sordid motives of selfishness or convenience. The actress is an absolutely independent wage-earner, and better compensated than the great majority of women who make their own livelihoods. She need not marry for money, or social position, for these are her natural possessions.”

“To actually be able to be paid to create something while I'm creating it? Not that that is a huge motivation for an artist, because that doesn't happen very often, but to be able to sit there and draw all day? It was such a luxury. My whole life, I had day jobs and fit my art in between. This was absolutely phenomenal.”

“No one suggests that John Roberts was motivated by bigotry or animosity toward minorities or women, ... But these memos lead one to question whether he truly appreciated the history of the civil rights struggle. He wrote about discrimination as an abstract concept, not as a flesh and blood reality for countless of his fellow citizens.”

Certain things need to be done again and again in life, but those things can be learned only in context, not as an abstraction. Different contexts must be provided in order to motivate students and to provide real world skills that will be remembered, not because they were studied and tested but because they were practicied again and again.

One thing I have learned from many years of watching my father is that some people, the best ones, are motivated more by the chance to prove themselves than by a command to serve. It is the work itself that calls them onward, especially if they believe they are the only ones who can do it.

Religion begins in story. Yes, it does, because religion is an attempt to make sense of what is incomprehensible to us, what is inexplicable, what is awe-inspiring, what is frightening, what moves us to great wonder, and so on. That is the religious impulse, and it is part of our psychological makeup -- of everyone's psychological makeup.

“If the female offender of these two possibly lost a child to a miscarriage, that might be a motive. I don't think she was going to take this child to try to sell it or move it. I think she was probably going to take it because she had lost one through a miscarriage at about six months.”

“'He got the majority of his big-league time after he turned 31. 'Sheaff' kept pressing that on me, telling me there is a chance you can get back up there and that you never know what can happen after that. That's been a motivating factor for me.”

“That's how my whole career has been, fighting for a spot. It's nothing new to me. It's something you embrace as a player and use as motivation. These next two weeks will be a similar situation, going in and competing, doing my thing and controlling the things I can control.”

One of the strongest motives that lead men to art and science is escape from everyday life with its painful crudity and hopeless dreariness, from the fetters of one's own ever-shifting desires. A finely tempered nature longs to escape from the personal life into the world of objective perception and thought.