#precept

My family, frankly, they weren't folks who went to church every week. My mother was one of the most spiritual people I knew but she didn't raise me in the church, so I came to my Christian faith later in life and it was because the precepts of Jesus Christ spoke to me in terms of the kind of life that I would want to lead. ↗

— Barack Obama

#came #christ #christian #christian faith #church

Practical wisdom is only to be learned in the school of experience. Precepts and instruction are useful so far as they go, but, without the discipline of real life, they remain of the nature of theory only. ↗

— Samuel Smiles

#experience #far #go #instruction #learned

In all the antique religions, mythology takes the place of dogma; that is, the sacred lore of priests and people... and these stories afford the only explanation that is offered of the precepts of religion and the prescribed rules of ritual. ↗

— William Robertson Smith

#antique #dogma #explanation #lore #mythology

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

#could #done #example #failure #failures

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

— Denis Diderot

#does #inconvenient #moral #precept #something

In almost everything, experience is more valuable than precept. ↗

— Quintilian

#everything #experience #more #precept #than

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

#actions #american #broken #each #every

The way is long if one follows precepts, but short... if one follows patterns. ↗

— Lucius Annaeus Seneca

#long #patterns #precepts #short #way

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

#because #break #concerns #end #fellow

To write out the precepts again, we contend with them, and keep them; we build our humanity, and keep our humanity alive... Thay has named the precepts 'wonderful'... Wonderful because they can protect us, and show us how to live a joyous life, an interesting, adventurous, deep, large life, and how to be with one another, and with animals, plants, and all the Earth and universe. Wonderful because when we practice the precepts, we existentially become humane, we embody loving kindness... Standing in the midst of burning ruins, I was glad that I knew the precepts. Though I kept their tenets imperfectly, even in aspiration I created some invisible good that could not be destroyed... The Five Wonderful Precepts give clear and simple directions to finding that life. In devastation, I have blueprints for making home anew (90-92). --For a Future to Be Possible: Commentaries on the Five Wonderful Precepts ↗

— Maxine Hong Kingston

#home