All 13 Uses of
motive
in
Crime and Punishment, by Dostoyevsky
- Our judges are not so blind and...not so drunk, and will not believe the testimony of two notorious infidels, agitators, and atheists, who accuse me from motives of personal revenge which they are foolish enough to admit....Yes, allow me to pass!†
Chpt 5.3 *motives = reasons for doing something
- In one place one hears of a student's robbing the mail on the high road; in another place people of good social position forge false banknotes; in Moscow of late a whole gang has been captured who used to forge lottery tickets, and one of the ringleaders was a lecturer in universal history; then our secretary abroad was murdered from some obscure motive of gain....And if this old woman, the pawnbroker, has been murdered by someone of a higher class in society—for peasants don't pawn gold trinkets—how are we to explain this demoralisation of the civilised part of our society?†
Chpt 2.5
- But that is not the chief motive for my decision....†
Chpt 3.3
- But at the very moment, he was struck by the strangeness of his own frankness, and the eagerness with which he had made this explanation, though he had kept up all the preceding conversation with gloomy repulsion, obviously with a motive, from necessity.†
Chpt 3.6
- "You know, there's hardly anything I take interest in," he went on, as it were dreamily, "especially now, I've nothing to do....You are quite at liberty to imagine though that I am making up to you with a motive, particularly as I told you I want to see your sister about something.†
Chpt 4.1
- Secondly, my conscience is perfectly easy; I make the offer with no ulterior motive.†
Chpt 4.1
- Then he says is he going to be married and has already fixed on the girl....No doubt he has a motive, and probably a bad one.†
Chpt 4.3
- The latter fact was very significant in Raskolnikov's eyes: he saw that Porfiry Petrovitch had not been embarrassed just before either, but that he, Raskolnikov, had perhaps fallen into a trap; that there must be something, some motive here unknown to him; that, perhaps, everything was in readiness and in another moment would break upon him... He went straight to the point at once, rose from his seat and took his cap.†
Chpt 4.5
- He can't be showing off his power with no motive...prompting me; he is far too clever for that...he must have another object.†
Chpt 4.5
- It must be noted that when Katerina Ivanovna exalted anyone's connections and fortune, it was without any ulterior motive, quite disinterestedly, for the mere pleasure of adding to the consequence of the person praised.†
Chpt 5.2
- "What is your motive for such benevolence?" asked Raskolnikov.†
Chpt 5.5
- It is true he was befriending Katerina Ivanovna's children, but who could tell with what motive and what it meant?†
Chpt 6.3
- To the decisive question as to what motive impelled him to the murder and the robbery, he answered very clearly with the coarsest frankness that the cause was his miserable position, his poverty and helplessness, and his desire to provide for his first steps in life by the help of the three thousand roubles he had reckoned on finding.†
Chpt Epil.
Definitions:
-
(1)
(motive as in: What is her motive?) a reason for doing something
-
(2)
(meaning too rare to warrant focus) Less commonly, motive can refer to something that causes motion in an inanimate object. Even less commonly, it can refer to a distinctive feature in music, art, or literature.