"Motiveless" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... experience suggests the dangers of those long stretches of emptiness, that so easily fill with the sinister and the unspeakable. I would pray, as a man in mortal terror, against the bottomless pit of a motiveless existence. ...
— Men in the Making • Ambrose Shepherd
... to life: for this is a distinct thing from goodness and propriety, as here described. The fourth point is consistency: for though the subject of the imitation, who suggested the type, be inconsistent, still he must be consistently inconsistent. As an example of motiveless degradation of character, we have Menelaus in the Orestes: of character indecorous and inappropriate, the lament of Odysseus in the Scylla, and the speech of Melanippe: of inconsistency, the Iphigenia at Aulis,—for Iphigenia the suppliant in no way resembles ...
— Poetics • Aristotle
... borderer, whom nobody has ever heard of except in connection with Logan; it would have served the purpose quite as well to have used the equally unknown name of the real offender, Greathouse. The fabrication of the speech would have been an absolutely motiveless and foolish transaction; to which Gibson, a pronounced whig, must needs have been a party. This last fact shows that there could have been no intention of using the speech in ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume One - From the Alleghanies to the Mississippi, 1769-1776 • Theodore Roosevelt
... of me, when I tell you my brother has rudely said to me that I was too forward in my intercourse with you. It is humiliating to say this to you; but I must, for it explains my conduct, which save in this regard has been motiveless. ...
— The Memories of Fifty Years • William H. Sparks
... wasn't it awful? It might have been you or me! I do believe the masked man is on the warpath, only he went for her this time instead. It may be a lunatic, for every act seems so perfectly motiveless." ...
— When the Birds Begin to Sing • Winifred Graham |
