“Precepts may instruct, but examples persuade.”
Thomas Brooks (1608–1680) English Puritan
Heaven On Earth, 1654
London's Lamentations
“Precepts may instruct, but examples persuade.”
Thomas Brooks (1608–1680) English Puritan
Heaven On Earth, 1654
Brian Campbell Vickery (1918–2009) British information theorist
Source: Information Systems (1973), p. 1.
“Example is always more efficacious than precept.”
Samuel Johnson book The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia
Source: The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia (1759), Chapter 29
“Brotherhood is an ideal better understood by example than precept!”
Paramahansa Yogananda book Autobiography of a Yogi
Source: Autobiography of a Yogi, Chapter 48 - "At Encinitas In California"
Carl Sagan (1934–1996) American astrophysicist, cosmologist, author and science educator
The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God (2006)
Context: Many religions lay out a set of precepts... and claim that these instructions were given by a god or gods. For example, the first code of law by Hammurabi of Babylon... was handed to him by the god Marduk... this is a bamboozle... a pious hoax.... if Hammurabi had merely said, "Here's what I think everybody should do," he would have been much less successful...
Derren Brown (1971) British illusionist
TV Series and Specials (Includes DVDs), Derren Brown: The Heist (2006)
“Everywhere he found his precept checkmated by his example.”
Max Beerbohm (1872–1956) English writer
Source: Zuleika Dobson http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext99/zdbsn11.txt (1911), Ch. XV
“It is a trite but true observation, that examples work more forcibly on the mind than precepts.”
Henry Fielding book Joseph Andrews
Book I, Ch. 1
Joseph Andrews (1742)
“With gay descriptions sprinkle here and there
Some grave instructive sentences with care,
That touch on life, some moral good pursue,
And give us virtue in a transient view;
Rules, which the future sire may make his own,
And point the golden precepts to his son.”
Saepe etiam memorandum inter ludicra memento,
Permiscere aliquid breviter, mortalia corda
Quod moveat, tangens humanae commoda vitae,
Qodque olim jubeant natos meminisse parentes.
Marco Girolamo Vida (1485–1566) Italian bishop
Book II, line 278
De Arte Poetica (1527)
Wynford Dewhurst (1864–1941) British artist
Source: Impressionist Painting: its genesis and development. (1904), p. vii; Preface.