"Motiveless" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... and exclusive grace. But they do not perceive that Calvinism destroys all ideas of grace, by making God the author of the misery which He affects to pity, and by tracing the divine conduct to mere motiveless caprice, to blind and ...
— On Calvinism • William Hull
... motive-hunting of a motiveless malignity—how awful it is! Yea, whilst he is still allowed to bear the divine image, it is too fiendish for his own steady view,—for the lonely gaze of a being next to devil, and only not quite devil,—and yet a character which Shakspeare has attempted and executed, without ...
— Literary Remains, Vol. 2 • Coleridge
... Harry, in unstepping the mast, might have seemed influenced merely by a motiveless impulse; but, in truth, a latent suspicion of Jack's intentions instigated him, and as he laid the mast, sprit and sail on the thwarts, he determined, in his own mind, to remove them all to some other place, as soon ...
— Jack Tier or The Florida Reef • James Fenimore Cooper
... great ability, and executed it with daring, his good sense and good luck forsook him. He made no use of the crime he had committed; and from that day forward till his own assassination, nothing prospered with him. Indeed, the murder of Alessandro appears to have been almost motiveless, considered from the point of view of practical politics. Varchi assumes that Lorenzino's burning desire of glory prompted the deed; and when he had acquired the notoriety he sought, there was an end to his ambition. This view is confirmed by the Apology he wrote ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece • John Addington Symonds
... distinguish such a woman as I have described to you from a common thief. There is the insane desire to steal—merely for stealing's sake—a morbid craving. Of course in a sense it is stealing. But it is persistent, incorrigible, irrational, motiveless, useless. ...
— Constance Dunlap • Arthur B. Reeve
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