"Motiveless" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... knew all the time to be untenable? The impropriety of such a course, unless the work was, like Buffon's, transparently ironical, could only be matched by its fatuousness, or indeed by the folly of one who should assign action so motiveless to any one out of a ...
— Luck or Cunning? • Samuel Butler
... the October sunlight, dressed in her blue-green costume, with all the details to "correspond," and leading Beppo on the leash. To lead Beppo on the leash, as Steptoe had perceived, gave a reason for an excursion which would otherwise have seemed motiveless. But she was out. She was out in conditions in which even Judson Flack, had he met her, could hardly have detected her. Gorgeously arrayed as she seemed to herself she was dressed with the simplicity which stamps the French taste. ...
— The Dust Flower • Basil King
... excitement of stealing, not the desire for the object stolen, which distinguishes the kleptomaniac from the ordinary thief. Usually the kleptomaniac is a woman, with an insane desire to steal for the mere sake of stealing. The morbid craving for excitement which is at the bottom of so many motiveless and useless crimes, again and again has driven apparently sensible men and women to ruin and even to suicide. It is a form of emotional insanity, not loss of control of the will, but perversion of the will. Some are models ...
— The Dream Doctor • Arthur B. Reeve
... hour in the morning of the 22d, immense crowds had assembled in the Place de la Madeleine, the Place de la Concorde, and the Champs Elysees. Here they swayed to and fro, hour after hour, motiveless, awaiting the progress of events. M. Guizot was then Minister of Foreign Affairs, and M. Duchatel Minister of the Interior. In the afternoon a large band of students swept through the streets singing ...
— Louis Philippe - Makers of History Series • John S. C. (John Stevens Cabot) Abbott
... 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
|
