Precept

“We must reject the idea that every time a law's broken, society is guilty rather than the lawbreaker. It is time to restore the American precept that each individual is accountable for his actions.”

- Ronald Reagan

“Hate the sin and not the sinner is a precept which, though easy enough to understand, is rarely practiced, and that is why the poison of hatred spreads in the world.”

- Mahatma Gandhi

“As for what concerns our relations with our fellow men, the anguish in our neighbor's soul must break all precept. All that we do is a means to an end, but love is an end in itself, because God is love.”

- Edith Stein

“Mahavira, the Jain patriarch, surpassed the morality of the Bible with a single sentence: Do not injure, abuse, oppress, enslave, insult, torment, torture, or kill any creature or living being. Imagine how different our world might be if the Bible contained this as its central precept.”

- Sam Harris

“Example is the best precept.”

- Aesop

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

- Robert Cecil

“The first precept was never to accept a thing as true until I knew it as such without a single doubt.”

- Rene Descartes

“There is no moral precept that does not have something inconvenient about it.”

- Denis Diderot

“Where one person shapes their life by precept and example, there are a thousand who have shaped it by impulse and circumstances.”

- James Russell Lowell

“A good example is far better than a good precept.”

- Dwight L. Moody

“In almost everything, experience is more valuable than precept.”

- Quintilian

“Wisdom does not show itself so much in precept as in life - in firmness of mind and a mastery of appetite. It teaches us to do as well as to talk; and to make our words and actions all of a color.”

- Lucius Annaeus Seneca

“It is a mistake to suppose that men succeed through success; they much oftener succeed through failures. Precept, study, advice, and example could never have taught them so well as failure has done.”

- Samuel Smiles

“In regard to religion, mutual toleration in the different professions thereof is what all good and candid minds in all ages have ever practised, and, both by precept and example, inculcated on mankind.”

- Samuel Adams

“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.”

- Mustafa Kemal Atatürk

“It cannot at this time be too often repeated; line upon line; precept upon precept; until it comes into the currency of a proverb, To innovate is not to reform..”

- Edmund Burke

“They won't be required to sacrifice anything in order to belong to your assembly. A religion that is all sweetness, but no light; all form, but no substance; all tradition, but no precept.”

- Orson Scott Card