All 50 Uses of

motive
in
Middlemarch

"We must not inquire too curiously into motives," he interposed, in his measured way.†
Chpt 1

motives = reasons for doing something

Before changing his course, he always needed to shape his motives and bring them into accordance with his habitual standard.†
Chpt 2

He went through a great deal of spiritual conflict and inward argument in order to adjust his motives, and make clear to himself what God's glory required.†
Chpt 2

But, as we have seen, his motives were not always rightly appreciated.†
Chpt 2

Very few men could have been as filial and chivalrous as he was to the mother, aunt, and sister, whose dependence on him had in many ways shaped his life rather uneasily for himself; few men who feel the pressure of small needs are so nobly resolute not to dress up their inevitably self-interested desires in a pretext of better motives.†
Chpt 2

I tax no man's motives: let them lie between himself and a higher Power; but I do say, that there are influences at work here which are incompatible with genuine independence, and that a crawling servility is usually dictated by circumstances which gentlemen so conducting themselves could not afford either morally or financially to avow.†
Chpt 2

I consider Mr. Tyke an exemplary man—none more so—and I believe him to be proposed from unimpeachable motives.†
Chpt 2

There was silence for a few moments, while Dorothea sat as if she had been turned to marble, though the life within her was so intense that her mind had never before swept in brief time over an equal range of scenes and motives.†
Chpt 3

They had nearly the same preferences in silks, patterns for underclothing, china-ware, and clergymen; they confided their little troubles of health and household management to each other, and various little points of superiority on Mrs. Bulstrode's side, namely, more decided seriousness, more admiration for mind, and a house outside the town, sometimes served to give color to their conversation without dividing them—well-meaning women both, knowing very little of their own motives.†
Chpt 3

A man may, from various motives, decline to give his company, but perhaps not even a sage would be gratified that nobody missed him.†
Chpt 3

He would never have been easy to call his action anything else than duty; but in this case, contending motives thrust him back into negations.†
Chpt 4

If there were one man who would carry you a medical reform and another who would oppose it, should you inquire which had the better motives or even the better brains?†
Chpt 5

I meant that a man may work for a special end with others whose motives and general course are equivocal, if he is quite sure of his personal independence, and that he is not working for his private interest—either place or money.†
Chpt 5

Motives are points of honor, I suppose—nobody can prove them.†
Chpt 5

Every leaf was at rest in the sunshine, the familiar scene was changeless, and seemed to represent the prospect of her life, full of motiveless ease—motiveless, if her own energy could not seek out reasons for ardent action.†
Chpt 6

motiveless = lacking a reason for doing something

Every leaf was at rest in the sunshine, the familiar scene was changeless, and seemed to represent the prospect of her life, full of motiveless ease—motiveless, if her own energy could not seek out reasons for ardent action.†
Chpt 6

This implicit reasoning is essentially no more peculiar to evangelical belief than the use of wide phrases for narrow motives is peculiar to Englishmen.†
Chpt 6

motives = reasons for doing something

It is certainly trying to a man's dignity to reappear when he is not expected to do so: a first farewell has pathos in it, but to come back for a second lends an opening to comedy, and it was possible even that there might be bitter sneers afloat about Will's motives for lingering.†
Chpt 6

She felt to the full all the imperativeness of the motives which urged Will's conduct.†
Chpt 6

Lydgate had so many times boasted both to himself and others that he was totally independent of Bulstrode, to whose plans he had lent himself solely because they enabled him to carry out his own ideas of professional work and public benefit—he had so constantly in their personal intercourse had his pride sustained by the sense that he was making a good social use of this predominating banker, whose opinions he thought contemptible and whose motives often seemed to him an absurd mixture of contradictory impressions—that he had been creating for himself strong ideal obstacles to the proffering of any considerable request to him on his own account.†
Chpt 7

At six o'clock he had already been long dressed, and had spent some of his wretchedness in prayer, pleading his motives for averting the worst evil if in anything he had used falsity and spoken what was not true before God.†
Chpt 7

Various motives urged Bulstrode to this open-handedness, but he did not himself inquire closely into all of them.†
Chpt 7 *

They made more distinct within him the uneasy consciousness which had shown its first dim stirrings only a few hours before, that Bulstrode's motives for his sudden beneficence following close upon the chillest indifference might be merely selfish.†
Chpt 7

But the moral grounds of suspicion remained: the strong motives Bulstrode clearly had for wishing to be rid of Raffles, and the fact that at this critical moment he had given Lydgate the help which he must for some time have known the need for; the disposition, moreover, to believe that Bulstrode would be unscrupulous, and the absence of any indisposition to believe that Lydgate might be as easily bribed as other haughty-minded men when they have found themselves in want of money.†
Chpt 7

And after all, the suspicion of Bulstrode's motives might be unjust.†
Chpt 8

The suspicions against me had no hold there: they are grounded on the knowledge that I took money, that Bulstrode had strong motives for wishing the man to die, and that he gave me the money as a bribe to concur in some malpractices or other against the patient—that in any case I accepted a bribe to hold my tongue.†
Chpt 8

It seemed to him this evening as if the cruelty of his outburst to Rosamond had made an obligation for him, and he dreaded the obligation: he dreaded Lydgate's unsuspecting good-will: he dreaded his own distaste for his spoiled life, which would leave him in motiveless levity.†
Chpt 8

motiveless = lacking a reason for doing something

She was open, ardent, and not in the least self-admiring; indeed, it was pretty to see how her imagination adorned her sister Celia with attractions altogether superior to her own, and if any gentleman appeared to come to the Grange from some other motive than that of seeing Mr. Brooke, she concluded that he must be in love with Celia: Sir James Chettam, for example, whom she constantly considered from Celia's point of view, inwardly debating whether it would be good for Celia to accept him.†
Chpt 1

You give up from some high, generous motive.†
Chpt 1

He would never have contradicted her, and when a woman is not contradicted, she has no motive for obstinacy in her absurdities.†
Chpt 1

I have no motive for wishing anything else.†
Chpt 1

All her eagerness for acquirement lay within that full current of sympathetic motive in which her ideas and impulses were habitually swept along.†
Chpt 1

You do not like to hear these things, Vincy, but on this occasion I feel called upon to tell you that I have no motive for furthering such a disposition of property as that which you refer to.†
Chpt 2

The notion of murder was absurd: no motive was discoverable, the young couple being understood to dote on each other; and it was not unprecedented that an accidental slip of the foot should have brought these grave consequences.†
Chpt 2

Money had never been a motive to him.†
Chpt 2

But Dorothea remembered it to the last with the vividness with which we all remember epochs in our experience when some dear expectation dies, or some new motive is born.†
Chpt 2

Indeed we are most of us brought up in the notion that the highest motive for not doing a wrong is something irrespective of the beings who would suffer the wrong.†
Chpt 3

Poor Mrs. Cranch was bulky, and, breathing asthmatically, had the additional motive for making her remarks unexceptionable and giving them a general bearing, that even her whispers were loud and liable to sudden bursts like those of a deranged barrel-organ.†
Chpt 4

And if there is any objection to the proposal he mentioned, the giving him his true place and his true share would set aside any motive for his accepting it.†
Chpt 4

Some motive beneath the surface had been needed to account for Will's sudden change of in rejecting Mr. Casaubon's aid and quitting his travels; and this defiant determination to fix himself in the neighborhood by taking up something so much at variance with his former choice as Mr. Brooke's Middlemarch projects, revealed clearly enough that the undeclared motive had relation to Dorothea.†
Chpt 4

Some motive beneath the surface had been needed to account for Will's sudden change of in rejecting Mr. Casaubon's aid and quitting his travels; and this defiant determination to fix himself in the neighborhood by taking up something so much at variance with his former choice as Mr. Brooke's Middlemarch projects, revealed clearly enough that the undeclared motive had relation to Dorothea.†
Chpt 4

The immediate motive to the opposition, however, is the fact that Bulstrode has put the medical direction into my hands.†
Chpt 5

The pity which had been the restraining compelling motive in her life with him still clung about his image, even while she remonstrated with him in indignant thought and told him that he was unjust.†
Chpt 6

Do you not think so?" said Dorothea, rather despising herself for having a secret motive in asking the question.†
Chpt 6

The service he could do to the cause of religion had been through life the ground he alleged to himself for his choice of action: it had been the motive which he had poured out in his prayers.†
Chpt 6

The broken metaphor and bad logic of motive which had stirred his hearer's contempt were quite consistent with a mode of putting the facts which made it difficult for Lydgate to vent his own indignation and disappointment.†
Chpt 7

He did not measure the quantity of diseased motive which had made him wish for Lydgate's good-will, but the quantity was none the less actively there, like an irritating agent in his blood.†
Chpt 7

In his secret soul he believed that Lydgate suspected his orders to have been intentionally disobeyed, and suspecting this he must also suspect a motive.†
Chpt 7

As to any certainty that a particular method of treatment would either save or kill, Lydgate himself was constantly arguing against such dogmatism; he had no right to speak, and he had every motive for being silent.†
Chpt 7

He now felt the conviction that this man who was leaning tremblingly on his arm, had given him the thousand pounds as a bribe, and that somehow the treatment of Raffles had been tampered with from an evil motive.†
Chpt 7

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From Other Sources
Highlighting 2 Senses of the Word

Definitions:

(1) (motive as in: What is her motive?)
a reason for doing something
(2) (meaning too rare to warrant focus)
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.

Page Numbers by Book Edition

motive in Middlemarch

motive
in
Middlemarch