Object Lesson Quotes & Sayings

The physical world is too good a gift to be reduced to an object lesson about 'spiritual things'. — Kenneth Myers

A true life lived amongst the people is in itself an object-lesson that must produce its own effect upon immediate surroundings. — Mahatma Gandhi

I mean, in a way, I feel that one of the reasons for learning about Darwinian evolution is as an object lesson in how not to set up our values and social lives. — Richard Dawkins

The topic Walking with Christ daily The object Shoes of all styles, sizes, and colors - the more bizarre, the better. You can find a wide selection for next to nothing at a thrift shop. Try to get at least these kinds: work boots, bedroom slippers, dress shoes, running shoes, a pair that is totally worn-out, a pair with holes in the soles. The lesson Show the shoes one pair at a time, explaining how they can help us consider where we are in our walk with Christ: Dress shoes I have a nice, shiny faith on the outside - but I only bring it out on Sundays and special occasions. Bedroom slippers I've made a commitment to Christ, but I've been pretty lazy in terms of trying to serve him. — Helen Musick

It has always been an ambition of mine to serve as an object lesson for others. — Patricia Briggs

It was, for him, an object lesson in the importance of the "better out than in" free speech argument - that it was better to allow even the most reprehensible speech than to sweep it under the carpet, better to publicly contest and perhaps deride what was loathsome than to give it the glamour of taboo, and that, for the most part, people could be trusted to tell the good from the bad. — Salman Rushdie

I had a moment to visualize Larry out in the dark all alone, unarmed except for his cross. The thought made my skin cold. I opened my mouth to yell at him and closed it. Never dress anyone down in public unless it's an object lesson. I said, "Any tracks?" I gave myself a dozen brownie points for yelling.
"Do I look like Tonto? Beside the ground is just grass and it's been so dry lately. I don't think there'd be any tracks. — Laurell K. Hamilton

Jesus gave a vivid object lesson his last night with the disciples by washing their feet, like a servant. Parents know the self-giving principle by instinct as they pour their energies into their self-absorbed children. Volunteers in soup kitchens and hospices and mission projects learn this lesson by doing.* What seems like sacrifice becomes instead a kind of nourishment because dispensing grace enriches the giver as well as the receiver. — Philip Yancey

When I was a teenager, the biggest heartthrob was Tab Hunter. He was in every movie out of Warner Bros. until he was exposed as gay, and his career faded. That was an object lesson. I knew I must protect my sexual orientation. — George Takei

The entire Internet, as well as the types of devices represented by the desktop computer, the laptop computer, the iPhone, the iPod, and the iPad, are a continuing inescapable embarrassment to science fiction, and an object lesson in the fallibility of genre writers and their vaunted predictive abilities. — Paul Di Filippo

Everyone's life is an object lesson to others. — Karl G. Maeser

Death should teach you that what is real is life. And life teaches you that what is unavoidable is not death, but impermanence. Impermanence is the only truth. Nothing is permanent. All is changing. In every instant. In every moment. Were anything permanent, it could not be. For even the very concept of permanence depends upon impermanence to have any meaning. Therefore, even permanence is impermanent. Look at this deeply. Contemplate this truth. Comprehend it, and you comprehend God. This is the Dharma, and this is the Buddha. This is the Buddha Dharma. This is the teaching and the teacher. This is the lesson and the master. This is the object and the observer, rolled into one. They never have been other than One. It is you who have unrolled them, so that your life may unroll before you. — Neale Donald Walsch

Object lesson: in the world, everything is compensation. When you can't go fast, you push harder — Muriel Barbery

But whatever the form in which love appears, the lesson it teaches us is the same. We can never assimilate, never become, the beloved object. Possession is never complete, it will elude us in the end, and if we persist in our attempts to impose ourselves we will drown like Narcissus in the reflection of our own selves.

Yet if we can liberate ourselves from the desire to make the thing over in accordance with our own ideas, we open up a wonderful world of perception and understanding, and we can grasp dimly the majestic processes of human experience. Why should that come through the contemplation of lives so utterly unrelated to our own? Why love, if we can never possess?... — Molly Izzard

The Seeking of the Master. Musa Najib was asked why he charged a fee from those who came to his sessions; and why he often did not even address his audience. He said: 'I charge for this object lesson: people believe that knowledge must be given freely, and consequently mistake everything which is free for knowledge. I do not always lecture because, among Sufis, "The Master finds the pupil." The pupil has to be physically present: but he may be absent in every other sense. When I discern that a pupil is "present" then I "find" him, for then his inner call is audible to me, even if it is silent to him.' 'Seek and you will be found. — Idries Shah

What was the point of giving children freedom to experiment and fail, if one then turned it all into a tiresome object lesson? — Laura Lippman

The careful scholarship of the dedicated amateur mycophile R. Gordon Wasson reads like an exciting scientific detective story. Moreover, his willingness to pursue the quest through the wide range of linguistics, archeology, folklore, philology, ethnobotany, plant ecology, human physiology, and prehistory constitutes an object lesson to all holistic professional students of man. — Weston La Barre

He was a good fellow, but his rejoicing at the one little part, in which he was officially interested, of so great a tragedy, was an object-lesson in the limitations of sympathetic understanding. He — Bram Stoker

The first thing they do to you when you go into New-Path," Charles Freck said, "is they cut off your pecker. As an object lesson. And then they fan out in all directions from there."

"Your spleen next," Barris said.

"They what, they cut -- What does that do, a spleen?"

"Helps you digest your food."

"How?"

"By removing the cellulose from it."

"Then I guess after that --"

"Just noncellulose foods. No leaves or alfalfa."

"How long can you live that way?"

Barris said, "It depends on your attitude."

"How many spleens does the average person have?" He knew there usually were two kidneys.

"Depends on his weight and age."

"Why?" Charles Freck felt keen suspicion.

"A person grows more spleens over the years. By the time he's eighty --"

"You're shitting me. — Philip K. Dick

I had before me an object lesson, I thought: two ways to face the world. One way as embodied by this old woman - simple, unassuming, a kind of peasant dignity, a naturalness inherent in her every move. The other, exemplified by the girl - smartness, sophistication, veneer without substance. I was conscious that I have now opted for the old woman's way, have thrown in my lot with a creature I would have jeered at a year ago. My present trip to the mountains is indeed a trip to that wellspring of naturalness she symbolized. And I admired my choice: the correct choice, the only choice for a sensitive and moral man in my dilemma. — Lee Smith

At Gabriel College there was a very holy object on the high altar of the Oratory, covered with a black velvet cloth... At the height of the invocation the Intercessor lifted the cloth to reveal in the dimness a glass dome inside which there was something too distant to see, until he pulled a string attached to a shutter above, letting a ray of sunlight through to strike the dome exactly. Then it became clear: a little thing like a weathervane, with four sails black on one side and white on the other, began to whirl around as the light struck it. It illustrated a moral lesson, the Intercessor explained, for the black of ignorance fled from the light, whereas the wisdom of white rushed to embrace it.

{Alluding to William Crookes's radiometer.} — Philip Pullman

She was an object lesson on the essential luck, whatever hardships may come their way, of those born able to make things. — Diana Athill

The stillest thing in the world is the corpse of someone you loved. A hunk of cold granite seems more alive than a dead human being. You don't expect a stone to move. A person robbed of all motion and cold to the touch is the most alien object in the world. Natural instinct drives us away from the decaying body, and quickly. Yet love compels us forward, to kiss the empty vessel of the soul departed. ...Lesson two: there are many fates worse than death. The most common is surviving the death of a loved one. For the dead, all questions have been answered or made irrelevant. For the survivor, some questions have been rendered unanswerable. — Greg Iles

Exposure to a two-year-old boy was probably the best possible object lesson in the dangers of motherhood, — Diana Gabaldon

Purity, we see in the object-lesson, is NOT the one thing needful; and it is better that a life should contract many a dirt-mark, than forfeit usefulness in its efforts to remain unspotted. — William James

If you must hold yourself up to your children as an object lesson, hold yourself up as a warning and not as an example. — George Bernard Shaw

Women are mere "beauties" in men's culture so that culture can be kept male. When women in culture show character, they are not desirable, as opposed to the desirable. A beautiful heroine is a contradiction in terms, since heroism is about individuality, interesting and ever changing, while "beauty" is generic, boring, and inert. While culture works out moral dilemmas, "beauty" is amoral: If a woman is born resembling an art object, it is an accident of nature, a fickle consensus of mass perception, a peculiar coincidence
but it is not a moral act. From the "beauties" in male culture, women learn a bitter amoral lesson
that the moral lessons of their culture exclude them. — Naomi Wolf

To have striven so hard, to have molded a public personality out of so amorphous an identity, to have sustained that superhuman effort only to end with every weakness disclosed and every error compounding the downfall
that was a fate of biblical proportions. Evidently the Deity would not tolerate the presumption that all can be manipulated; an object lesson of the limits of human presumption was necessary. — Henry A. Kissinger

It takes a thousand men to invent a telegraph, or a steam engine, or a phonograph, or a photograph, or a telephone or any other important thing - and the last man gets the credit and we forget the others. He added his little mite - that is all he did. These object lessons should teach us that ninety-nine parts of all things that proceed from the intellect are plagiarisms, pure and simple; and the lesson ought to make us modest. But nothing can do that. — Mark Twain

The Pacific coral reef, as a kind of oasis in a desert, can stand as an object lesson for man who must now learn that mutualism between autotrophic and heterotrophic components, and between producers and consumers in the societal realm, coupled with efficient recycling of materials and use of energy, are the keys to maintaining prosperity in a world of limited resources. — Eugene Odum

The first meal was an object lesson of much variety. My father produced several kinds of food, ready to eat, without any cooking, from little tin cans that had printing all over them. — Mary Antin

The fall of Rome is often regarded as an object lesson in the wages of sin. Its contemporaries, however, more frequently laid the blame on the rise of Christianity ... Although they do not inquire into the future, and either forget or do not know the past, yet defame present times as most unusually beset, as it were, by evils because there is belief in Christ and worship of God, and increasingly less worship of idols. — Orosius

The only way Hinduism can convert the whole world to cow-protection is by giving an object-lesson in cow-protection and all it means. — Mahatma Gandhi

The object of our sojourns on earth, as apart from the gaining of experience, is but one. The loosing of ourselves from the coil of reincarnation, which, over and over again, brings us back to earth as on a coiled spring, until, having learned the last lesson of matter, leaped the last barrier, we are freed for ever from earth. — Shaw Desmond

But it was death that changed. People are still people. Some good, some bad. Death changed, and we don't know what death really means anymore. Maybe that was the point. Maybe this is an object lesson about the arrogance of our assumptions. Hard to say. But the world? She didn't change. She healed. We stopped hurting her and she began to heal. You can see it all around. The whole world is a forest now. The air is fresher. More trees, more oxygen. — Jonathan Maberry

Aging teaches us to follow our life force inward. It is an object lesson in how awareness is gradually drawn towards the center ... — Stephen Levine

In film schools of the future, professors will teach 'Tammy' as an object lesson in Making Everything Go Wrong. — Richard Corliss

Bill eventually became Mr Tottenham Hotspur, and produced such a dazzling team at White Hart Lane that they won the double and played the game in a way that was an object lesson to everybody. — Brian Clough

Trains induce such terrible anxiety. They image the possibility of total and irrevocable failure. They are also dirty, rackety, packed with strangers, an object lesson in the foul contingency of life: the talkative fellow-traveller, the possibility of children. — Iris Murdoch

In other words, all of my books are lies. They are simply maps of a territory, shadows of a reality, gray symbols dragging their bellies across the dead page, suffocated signs full of muffled sound and faded glory, signifying absolutely nothing. And it is the nothing, the Mystery, the Emptiness alone that needs to be realized: not known but felt, not thought but breathed, not an object but an atmosphere, not a lesson but a life. — Ken Wilber