Niccolo Machiavelli Quotes

There are six reasons anyone does anything: Love. Faith. Greed. Boredom. Fear..." he said, ticking them off on his fingers; but he lingered on the last, drawing a deep breath before he said, "Revenge.

Too many people hold a very narrow view of what motivates us. They believe that the only way to get us moving is with the jab of a stick or the promise of a carrot. But if you look at over 50 years of research on motivation, or simply scrutinize your own behavior, it's pretty clear human beings are more complicated than that.

Most of our decisions are driven by either love or fear. Figure out who's doing the talking, then decide what you'll do.

Men are moved by two levers only: fear and self interest.

We are human beings. We operate from wanting to be rewarded.

There appears to be but two grand master passions or movers in the human mind, namely, love and pride. And what constitutes the beauty or deformity of a man's character is the choice he makes under which banner he determines to enlist himself. But there is a strong distinction between different degress in the same thing and a mixture of two contraries.

People are motivated by fear, but they are not inspired by it. Everything that inspires us comes from love.

Everything you do is triggered by an emotion of either desire or fear.

One will rarely err if extreme actions be ascribed to vanity, ordinary actions to habit, and mean actions to fear.

There are two basic motivating forces: fear and love.

As fast as I can tell there are only two emotions that keep the world spinning year after year...One is fear. The other is desire.

I'm insatiably curious about human nature.

People react to fear, not love; they don't teach that in Sunday School, but it's true.

Human beings are very complex creatures. This desire, this greed, this love is very complex.

I don't think people do anything out of fear very well. So I think the only choice is to have them intrinsically motivated.

Man is primarily governed by passion and instinct.

I think the human mind is fascinating. I love figuring out why people are doing what they do.

All human actions have one or more of these seven causes: chance, nature, compulsions, habit, reason, passion, desire.

Everything we do in life is based on fear, especially love.

All these primary impulses, not easily described in words, are the springs of man's actions.

The reason that war is such a fascinating subject for writers is because it's a revealer. Put a bunch of people in an adrenaline-fuelled, life-or-death situation and their fundamental behaviours are exposed, the scrim is taken away and the motivations behind each personality come out to play.

I suppose one of the things that interest me about acting is unpicking what makes people tick and why they do what they do and what it means to be human.

How do you motivate a human being to do things against his own nature? There's two things: love and fear. And to me, love wins every time.

Love makes you do things you can never imagine.

Human action is governed largely by instinct and emotion.