motive
IPA: mˈoʊtɪv
noun
- (obsolete) An idea or communication that makes one want to act, especially from spiritual sources; a divine prompting.
- An incentive to act in a particular way; a reason or emotion that makes one want to do something; anything that prompts a choice of action.
- (obsolete, rare) A limb or other bodily organ that can move.
- (law) Something which causes someone to want to commit a crime; a reason for criminal behaviour.
- (architecture, fine arts, music) Alternative form of motif [A recurring or dominant element; an artistic theme.]
verb
- (transitive) To prompt or incite by a motive or motives; to move.
adjective
- Causing motion; having power to move, or tending to move
- Relating to motion and/or to its cause
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Examples of "motive" in Sentences
- The only people that the "motive" is relevant to is the police when looking for a suspect.
- New partners I don´t need unless the motive is purely acquisitive in nature and impersonal.
- I use it here to mean a doctrinaire Marxist whose main motive is hostility to the Stalin regime.
- [3] The term motive is applicable in all cases where the regular operations of inanimate matter are superseded by the interference of intelligence.
- The presence of what we call motive is something that comes and goes intermittently and which may or may not be present from the first awakening of consciousness.
- MBSS: DB, when people criticize israel for violating international law i would suspect the motive is anger over israel violating international law. if they happen to think that the existence of is israel is an injustice then they say so, as ido.
- I do reserve the right to permanently delete things — particularly when they have little merit and when they are posted by people whose main motive is evidently to undermine my authority and therefore, as far as I’m concerned, damage the project.
- The stronger motive may have determined our volition without our perceiving it; and if we desire to prove our independence of motive, by showing that we _can_ choose something different from that which we should naturally have chosen, we still cannot escape from the circle, this very desire becoming, as Mr. Hume observes, itself a _motive_.
- That power of the mind which we call motive, differeth from the power motive of the body. for the power motive of the body is that by which it moveth other bodies, which we call strength: but the power motive of the mind, is that by which the mind giveth animal motion to that body wherein it existeth; the acts hereof are our affections and passions, of which I am now to speak.
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