Quotes About Precept

In almost everything, experience is more valuable than precept.

Nature then becomes to him the measure of his attainments. So much of nature as he is ignorant of, so much of his own mind does he not yet possess. And, in fine, the ancient precept, "Know thyself," and the modern precept, "Study nature," become at last one maxim.

Example is the best precept.

At the conventional level, the precept of no intoxicants is understood as encouraging us to control our behavior by not using addictive substances to manipulate our state of being. Ironically, using individual effort to try to control our behavior is itself a violation of the ultimate meaning of the precept, because it is akin to manipulating our experience.

Example teaches better than precept. It is the best modeler of the character of men and women. To set a lofty example is the richest bequest a man can leave behind him.

Of all the arts poetry (which owes its origin almost entirely to genius and will least be guided by precept or example) maintains the first rank.

For the company of the great is good company as Shakespeare understood it, as Plutarch understood it. The past remains the source from which example and precept can still be drawn.

The more profoundly we study this wonderful book [the Bible], and the more closely we observe its divine precept, the better citizens we will become and the higher will be our destiny as a nation.

Another common error is to identify 'Apollonian' with 'good'—merely because our most respectable sects are all rather Apollonian in ritual and precept. Mere local prejudice.

All the men of the Old Testament were polygamists, and Christ and Paul, the central figures of the New Testament, were celibates, and condemned marriage by both precept and example.

The central activity of leadership is teaching - first by example, second by precept.

The road to learning by precept is long, but by example short and effective.

Example is better than precept.

It is evident, therefore, that the people of the South, in the crisis which confronted them in 1860, had no lack either of precept or of precedent for their instruction and guidance in the teaching and the example of our brethren of the North and East. The only practical difference was, that the North threatened and the South acted.

The most famous Obama precept is, 'No drama.'

A precept or command is a general teaching of God, obligating every man under pain of mortal sin - namely, in cases in which he has fallen away from the command. Hence, the saints who for a period of their life lived hypocritically sinned mortally for that period. So also the damned, by persistent false living, sin persistently in Hell.

Examples is more forcible than precept. People look at my six days in the week to see what I mean on the seventh.

Example is better than precept.

But this distinction between person and office is wholly alien to the teaching of Jesus. He says nothing about that. He addresses his disciples as men who have left all to follow him, and the precept of non-violence applies equally to private life and official duty. He is the Lord of all life, and demands undivided allegiance.

The nation has placed its faith in the precept that all laws should be inspired by actual needs here on earth as a basic fact of national life.

If you want nature to treat you well, you must treat nature well. If you start destroying nature, nature will destroy you, and this basic moral precept is fundamental in our present knowledge of ecology and conservation. What we know now about ecology points to the fact that nature exists in the most delicate balance, and that anything which tends to upset the balance will produce consequences of the most unexpected character and often of the most disastrous character.

A good example is far better than a good precept.

It was perhaps, the devil's oldest precept, that sin could always be trusted to reveal what was most human in a person as often for good as for ill.

For remember, ever, that Mind in its entirety is ever the Builder. For it is step by step, line by line, precept upon precept, here a little, there a little, that the attaining is accomplished in the mental, the spiritual, the material applications of an entity in this material world.