#precept

We love the precepts for the teacher's sake. ↗

— George Farquhar

#precepts #sake #teacher

Learn from me, if not by my precepts, then by my example, how dangerous is the pursuit of knowledge and how much happier is that man who believes his native town to be the world than he who aspires to be greater than his nature will allow. ↗

— Mary Wollstonecraft

#aspires #believes #dangerous #example #greater

I would like to ofer some exercises that can help us use the Five Precepts to cultivate and strengthen mindfulness. It is best to choose one of these exercises and work with it meticulously for a week. Then examine the results and choose another for a subsequent week. These practices can help us understand and find ways to work with each precept. 1. Refrain from killing: reverence for life. Undertake for one week to purposefully bring no harm in thought, word, or deed to any living creature. Particularly, become aware of any living beings in your world (people, animals, even plants) whom you ignore, and cultivate a sense of care and reverence for them too. 2. Refraining from stealing: care with material goods. Undertake for one week to act on every single thought of generosity that arises spontaneously in your heart. 3. Refraining from sexual misconduct: conscious sexuality. Undertake for one week to observe meticulously how often sexual feelings arise in your consciousness. Each time, note what particular mind states you find associated with them such as love, tension, compulsion, caring, loneliness, desire for communication, greed, pleasure, agression, and so forth. 4. Refraining from false speech: speech from the heart. Undertake for one week not to gossip (positively or negatively) or speak about anyone you know who is not present with you (any third party). 5. Refraining from intoxicants to the point of heedlessness. Undertake for one week or one month to refrain from all intoxicants and addictive substances (such as wine, marijuana, even cigarettes and/or caffeine if you wish). Observe the impulses to use these, and become aware of what is going on in the heart and mind at the time of those impulses (88-89). ↗

— Jack Kornfield

#mindfulness #communication

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

#example #impulse #life #person #precept

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

#appetite #color #does #firmness #itself

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

She was no longer struggling against the perception of facts, but adjusting herself to their clearest perception. ↗

— George Eliot

#preception #truth #life

Example is the best precept. ↗

— Aesop

#example #precept

I cannot remember a time when the Golden Rule was not my motto and precept, the torch that guided my footsteps. ↗

— James Cash Penney

#footsteps #golden #golden rule #guided #i