All 7 Uses
motive
in
The Murders in the Rue Morgue
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- The police are confounded by the seeming absence of motive—not for the murder itself—but for the atrocity of the murder.†
*motive = reason (for doing something)
- I wish you, therefore, to discard from your thoughts the blundering idea of motive, engendered in the brains of the police by that portion of the evidence which speaks of money delivered at the door of the house.†
- It would have been corroborative of this idea of motive.†
- But, under the real circumstances of the case, if we are to suppose gold the motive of this outrage, we must also imagine the perpetrator so vacillating an idiot as to have abandoned his gold and his motive together.†
- But, under the real circumstances of the case, if we are to suppose gold the motive of this outrage, we must also imagine the perpetrator so vacillating an idiot as to have abandoned his gold and his motive together.†
- Keeping now steadily in mind the points to which I have drawn your attention—that peculiar voice, that unusual agility, and that startling absence of motive in a murder so singularly atrocious as this—let us glance at the butchery itself.†
- If now, in addition to all these things, you have properly reflected upon the odd disorder of the chamber, we have gone so far as to combine the ideas of an agility astounding, a strength superhuman, a ferocity brutal, a butchery without motive, a grotesquerie in horror absolutely alien from humanity, and a voice foreign in tone to the ears of men of many nations, and devoid of all distinct or intelligible syllabification.†
Definitions:
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(1)
(motive as in: What is her motive?) a reason for doing something
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(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.