Human Motivation Quotes

Trust is the highest form of human motivation. ~ Stephen Covey

The latter is useful for predictive purposes only to the extent that the individual participant, in the market relationship, is guided by economic interest. Through the use of this specific assumption about human motivation, scholars have been able to establish for economic theory a limited claim as the only positive social science. ~ Anonymous

The state is concerned with the promotion of outward righteousness arising from the individual being constrained to keep the law. The Gospel alters human nature, whereas the state merely restrains human greed and evil, having no positive power to alter human motivation. ~ Alister E. McGrath

Scientists who study human motivation have lately learned that after basic survival needs have been met, the combination of autonomy (the desire to direct your own life), mastery (the desire to learn, explore, and be creative), and purpose (the desire to matter, to contribute to the world) are our most powerful intrinsic drivers - the three things that motivate us most. All three are deeply woven through the fabric of flow. Thus toying with flow involves tinkering with primal biology: addictive neurochemistry, potent psychology, and hardwired evolutionary behaviors. ~ Steven Kotler

The fact that power plays a role in human motivation does not mean that it plays the only role, or even the primary role ... Beware of single cause interpretations--and beware the people who purvey them. ~ Jordan B. Peterson

The desire to know and to understand are themselves conative, i.e., have a striving character, and are as much personality needs as the "basic needs" we have already discussed. ~ Abraham H. Maslow

The right to hope is the most powerful human motivation I know. ~ Aga Khan IV

There is indeed something deeply wrong with a person who lacks principles, who has no moral core. There are, likewise, certainly values that brook no compromise, and I would count among them integrity, fairness, and the avoidance of cruelty. But I have never accepted the argument that principle is compromised by judging each situation on its own merits, with due appreciation of the idiosyncrasy of human motivation and fallibility. ~ Sonia Sotomayor

Forgive me,' said Abbot Zerchi. 'I wasn't getting ready to argue moral theology with you. I was speaking only of this spectacle of mass euthanasia in terms of human motivation. the very existence of the Radiation Disaster Act, and like laws in other countries, is the plainest possible evidence that governments were fully aware of the consequences of another war, but instead of trying to make the crime impossible, they tried to provide in advance for the consequences of the crime. Are the implications of that fact meaningless to you, Doctor? ~ Walter M. Miller Jr.

Vengeance is a strange human motivation
it can drive a man to do things which he neither would nor could achieve without it ... and because of that it lies behind some of the greatest sagas of human literature! ~ H. Beam Piper

Adam Smith's image of competition in the marketplace was intended as an adjunct to his detailed description of human motivation in The Theory of Moral Sentiments , in which the pursuit of profit is tempered at every juncture by sympathy and benevolence, and by the posture of the "impartial spectator" which is forced on us by our moral nature. ~ Ted Malloch

We do not see nature or intelligence or human motivation or ideology as "it" is but only as our languages are. And our languages are our media. Our media are our metaphors. Our metaphors create the content of our culture. ~ Neil Postman

Leadership is about tapping the wellsprings of human motivation - and about fundamental relations with one's fellows. ~ Tom Peters

We're in a period right now where nobody asks any questions about psychology. No one has any feeling for human motivation. No one talks about sexuality in terms of emotional needs and symbolism and the legacy of childhood. Sexuality has been politicized--"Don't ask any questions!" "No discussion!" "Gay is exactly equivalent to straight!" And thus in this period of psychological blindness or inertness, our art has become dull. There's nothing interesting being written--in fiction or plays or movies. Everything is boring because of our failure to ask psychological questions.

So I say there is a big parallel between Bill Cosby and Bill Clinton--aside from their initials! Young feminists need to understand that this abusive behavior by powerful men signifies their sense that female power is much bigger than they are! These two people, Clinton and Cosby, are emotionally infantile--they're engaged in a war with female power. It has something to do with their early sense of being smothered by female power--and this pathetic, abusive and criminal behavior is the result of their sense of inadequacy.


Now, in order to understand that, people would have to read my first book, "Sexual Personae"--which of course is far too complex for the ordinary feminist or academic mind! It's too complex because it requires a sense of the ambivalence of human life. Everything is not black and white, for heaven's sake! We are formed by all kinds of strange or vague memories fr ~ Camille Paglia

That so many of us find it entirely plausible that a vast network of researchers and health officials and doctors worldwide would willfully harm children for money is evidence of what capitalism is really taking from us. Capitalism has already impoverished the working people who generate wealth for others. And capitalism has already impoverished us culturally, robbing unmarketable art of its value. But when we begin to see the pressures of capitalism as innate laws of human motivation, when we begin to believe that everyone is owned, then we are truly impoverished. ~ Eula Biss

If then the power of speech is as great as any that can be named, - if the origin of language is by many philosophers considered nothing short of divine - if by means of words the secrets of the heart are brought to light, pain of soul is relieved, hidden grief is carried off, sympathy conveyed, experience recorded, and wisdom perpetuated, - if by great authors the many are drawn up into unity, national character is fixed, a people speaks, the past and the future, the East and the West are brought into communication with each other, - if such men are, in a word, the spokesmen and the prophets of the human family - it will not answer to make light of Literature or to neglect its study: rather we may be sure that, in proportion as we master it in whatever language, and imbibe its spirit, we shall ourselves become in our own measure the ministers of like benefits to others - be they many or few, be they in the obscurer or the more distinguished walks of life - who are united to us by social ties, and are within the sphere of our personal influence. ~ John Henry Newman

At the end of the day let their be no regrets, only a desire to do more tomorrow than you did today. ~ Noel DeJesus

And here she was now, over those boulders and parched hills, with a home of her own, a husband of her own, heading toward on final, cherished province: Motherhood. How delectable it was to think of this baby, her baby, their baby. How glorious it was to know that her love for it already dwarfed anything she had ever felt as a human being, to know that there was no need any longer for pebble games. ~ Khaled Hosseini

Winslow says I don't understand plotting and probably I don't - I have been congratulated many times on the skill shown in my plotting when I knew damn well that the story in question had not been plotted in advance at all. My notion of a story is an interesting situation in which a human being has to cope with a problem, does so, and thereby changes his personality, character, or evaluations in some measure because the coping has forced him to revise his thinking. How h copes with it I can't plot because that depends on his character, and I don't know his what his character is until i get acquainted with him. When I can "hear the character talk" then I'm all right - he works out his own salvation. ~ Robert A. Heinlein

The human species and the global economy may well keep growing, but many more individuals may live in hunger and want. ~ Yuval Noah Harari

There are plenty of violent people, but for any randomly selected person today the chances of meeting a violent death at the hands of his or her fellow humans is lower now than it has ever been in human history. ~ Peter Singer

If anything, we older people yearn for a peaceful world even more than young people do. We are the ones who lost friends or relatives in some war. We are the ones who have lived a lifetime of seeing and reading about human suffering. ~ Dennis Prager

I have been reading the morning paper. I do it every morning-knowing well that I shall find in it the usual depravities and basenesses and hypocrisies and cruelties that make up civilization, and cause me to put in the rest of the day pleading for the damnation of the human race. I cannot seem to get my prayers answered, yet I do not despair. ~ Mark Twain

I don't think Steve [Jobs] started Apple as a scam. But he understood early on the power of marketing. The idea of the computer as a bicycle for the human mind - I think that was something he believed. ~ Alex Gibney

Charles Williams has said of the Lord's Prayer, "No word in English carries a greater possibility of terror than the little word 'as' in that clause." What makes the 'as' so terrifying? The fact that Jesus plainly links our forgiven-ness by the Father with our forgiving-ness of fellow human beings. Jesus' next remark could not be more explicit: 'If you do not forgive men their sins, your Father will not forgive your sins.' ~ Philip Yancey

We must have a religion - it goes without saying - but my idea is, to have it cut up into forty free sects, so that they will police each other, as had been the case in the United States in my time. Concentration of power in a political machine is bad; and and an Established Church is only a political machine; it was invented for that; it is nursed, cradled, preserved for that; it is an enemy to human liberty, and does no good which it could not better do in a split-up and scattered condition. That wasn't law; it wasn't gospel: it was only an opinion - my opinion, and I was only a man, one man: so it wasn't worth any more than the pope's - or any less, for that matter. ~ Mark Twain

We are forced to fight a duel. We are forced by honour and an internal intellectual need. Do not, for your own sake, attempt to stop us. I know all the excellent and ethical things that you will want to say to us. I know all about the essential requirements of civil order: I have written leading articles about them all my life. I know all about the sacredness of human life; I have bored all my friends with it. Try and understand our position. This man and I are alone in the modern world in that we think that God is essentially important. I think He does not exist; that is where the importance comes in for me. But this man thinks that He does exist, and thinking that very properly thinks Him more important than anything else. Now we wish to make a great demonstration and assertion - something that will set the world on fire like the first Christian persecutions. If ~ G.K. Chesterton

I express the principle of one's freedom as a human being in this formula: No one can compel me (in accordance with his beliefs about the welfare of others) to be happy after his fashion. ~ Immanuel Kant

The most degrading of human passions is the fear of death. It tears away the restraints and the conventions which alone make social life possible to man; it reveals the brute in him which underlies them all. In the desperate hand-to-hand struggle for life there is no element of nobility. He who is engaged upon it throws aside honor, he throws aside self-respect, he throws aside all that would make victory worth having - he asks for nothing but bare life. ~ Gertrude Bell

I want them to think of being in church as being in the middle of a work of art, a collective witness of fellow human beings, wherever they are and whatever they're up to. ~ David Dark

Each state of the human mind has some parable in the physical creation by which it is shadowed forth; nor is it only artists and poets, but even the most abstract thinkers that have drawn from this source. Lively activity we name fire; time is a stream that rolls on, sweeping all before it; eternity is a circle; a mystery is hid in midnight gloom, and truth dwells in the sun. Nay, I begin to believe that even the future destiny of the human race is prefigured in the dark oracular utterances of bodily creation. ~ Friedrich Schiller

What is it about a hand that seems quintessentially human? The answer must, at some level, be that the hand is a visible connection between us; it is a signature for who we are and what we can attain. Our ability to grasp, to build, and to make our thoughts real lies inside this complex of bones, nerves, and vessels. ~ Neil Shubin

Not to know one's true identity is to be a mad, disensouled thing - a golem. And, indeed, this image, sick-eningly Orwellian, applies to the mass of human beings now living in the high-tech industrial democracies. Their authenticity lies in their ability to obey and follow mass style changes that are conveyed through the media. Immersed in junk food, trash media, and cryp-tofascist politics, they are condemned to toxic lives of low awareness. Sedated by the prescripted daily television fix, they are a living dead, lost to all but the act of consuming. ~ Terence McKenna

If fruitful love, meant to perpetuate the race, noble as a familial, social, human duty, is superior to purely sensual love, then there is no hierarchy of sterile loves, and such a love is no less moral - or, rather, it is no more immoral for a woman to find pleasure with another woman than with a person of the opposite sex. ~ Marcel Proust

I stare at the table for a moment, lost in thoughts of what it will be like to hold a human being that I made in my hands. I can write a song and I can play it until my fingers bleed, but I can't carry music in my hands. I can't touch it or smell it. I can't give it my heart. ~ Cassia Leo

The here and now is only the smallest part of who we are, each of us is all that we have been, all our stories, all that we could be. ~ Patricia Forde

Melville had always seemed less invested in splitting the world into opposites than in reporting on human helplessness. ~ Rebekah Frumkin

The path of the norm is the path of least resistance; it is the route we take when we're on auto-pilot and don't even realize we're following a course of action that we haven't consciously chosen. Most people who eat meat have no idea that they're behaving in accordance with the tenets of a system that has defined many of their values, preferences, and behaviors. What they call 'free choice' is, in fact, the result of a narrowly obstructed set of options that have been chosen for them. They don't realize, for instance, that they have been taught to value human life so far above certain forms of nonhuman life that it seems appropriate for their taste preferences to supersede other species' preference for survival. ~ Melanie Joy

Never try to change the nature of anyone in your life, you will loose respect and eventually the person. ~ Ashar Siddiqui

Next year, Equality Now will celebrate - if that's the word - will clock its twentieth year. Two decades of fighting the good fight, fighting the cause, and in case I haven't been the clear, the cause is that one half of the human race is given the same basic equal rights that the other half enjoys.
Or, not given. Given back.
That is not a milestone, twenty years, that I intend to go unnoticed. I want to make some noise. I want to make a joyful noise, I want to make too much noise. I want the neighbors to complain.
I'm tired of being polite about something that matters so much. ~ Joss Whedon

what use was it to observe the human species and try to understand it? Their rules were fathomless and no mire fixed than the wind ~ Sarah Perry

For human beings, not to speak is to die"
-from "The Word ~ Pablo Neruda

I am like every human, a manifestation of life, i am more than what this job says i am. ~ Alain Bremond-Torrent

If you have nothing to hide, then you have nothing to fear. This is a dangerously narrow conception of the value of privacy. Privacy is an essential human need, and central to our ability to control how we relate to the world. Being stripped of privacy is fundamentally dehumanizing, and it makes no difference whether the surveillance is conducted by an undercover policeman following us around or by a computer algorithm tracking our every move. ~ Bruce Schneier

Economic growth and human development need to go hand in hand. Human values need to be advocated vigorously. ~ Kailash Satyarthi

Human language has a vocabulary suited to our daily needs and functions: the shape of any human language maps approximately to the needs and activities of our mundane lives. But few would deny that there is another dimension of human existence which transcends the mundane: call it the soul, the spirit: it is that part of the human frame which sees the shimmer of the numinous. ~ Julian Burnside

You are a blooming rose. Keep on blooming and keep on inspiring everyone! ~ Avijeet Das

As Israel made the wants of his national existence the law of the world, as under the dominance of these wants he deified even his political vindictiveness; so the Christian made the requirements of human feeling the absolute powers and laws of the world. [T]hat is, indeed, only of man considered as Christian; for Christianity, in contradiction with the genuine universal human heart, recognised man only under the condition, the limitation, of belief in Christ. ~ Ludwig Feuerbach

I'm always shocked that gay marriage is such a big deal. You have to realize how precious human life is, when there are tsunamis and mudslides, when there are armies and terrorists - at any moment, you could be gone, and potentially in the most brutal fashion. ~ Jennifer Beals

...We are truly human when we live for a purpose far above ourselves; but most people prefer to identify with an entity for the sake of belonging; thereby subjecting themselves to the spirit of collective selfishness that is only found in groups... ~ Janvier Chouteu-Chando

Hezbollah's contempt for human suffering is total, as it showed once again this morning when its rockets murdered two Israeli Arab children in Nazareth. ~ Tom Lantos

The weakness of God is stronger than human strength. And it leads, as Jesus said it would lead, to a life of following him, which would itself be about taking up the cross and so finding life, about the meek inheriting the earth. The point of it all, once more, is vocational: if we can study Genesis and human origins without hearing the call to be an image-bearing human being renewed in Jesus, we are massively missing the point, perhaps pursuing our own dream of an otherworldly salvation that merely colludes with the forces of evil, as gnosticism always does. ~ N. T. Wright

Nothing beats having a genuine compassion for human souls. If there is one thing I know, it's that people want to be acknowledged; they want to be heard; and above all, they want to be appreciated. ~ Sasha Azevedo

When all is said and done, the invention of writing must be reckoned not only as a brilliant innovation but as a surpassing good for humanity. And assuming that we survive long enough to use their inventions wisely, I believe the same will be said of the modern Thoths and Prometheuses who are today devising
computers and programs at the edge of machine intelligence. ~ Carl Sagan

In fact, humans on Titan could fly by muscle power. A human in a hang glider could comfortably take off and cruise around powered by oversized swim-flipper boots - or even take off by flapping artificial wings. The power requirements are minimal - it would probably take no more effort than walking. ~ Randall Munroe

The doctrine of Original Sin is the most democratizing idea in all of human history. ~ Rosaria Champagne Butterfield

He stood taller, and straighter, and broader, and infinitely more human than anything else Marcii could possibly imagine. ~ Ross Turner

Your journey is completely yours. It is unique. Others may try to steal part of it, tell it in their words or shape it to suit them. Reality is no one can live it or own it but you. Take charge of your journey, it's yours and yours alone! ~ Kemi Sogunle