Example quotes
1.5K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
Explore further
Browse quotes that often appear alongside example — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
Quote collection
Follow a thought to its author, or read the full quote page.
"Be stirring as the time; be fire with fire. Threaten the threat'ner, and outface the brow Of bragging horror. So shall inferior eyes, That borrow their behaviors from the great, Grow great by your example and put on The dauntless spirit of resolution."
"You can't tell them anything, but hopefully they will learn from the example and won't have to go through it."
"Example is a dangerous lure: where the wasp got through the gnat sticks fast."
"I want to live in a world where people become famous because of their work for peace and justice and care. I want the famous to be inspiring; their lives an example of what every human being has it in them to do - act from love!"
"When men are able to influence so many others through their life and their example, they do not die."
"Cultural conditioning is like bad software. Over and over it's diddled with and re-written so that it can just run on the next attempt. But there is cultural hardware, and it's that cultural hardware, otherwise known as authentic being, that we are propelled toward by the example of the shaman and the techniques of the shaman. ... Shamanism therefore is a call to authenticity."
"[...] endless action and reaction. Those beautifully rounded pebbles which you gather on the sand and which you hold in your hand and marvel at their exceeding smoothness, were chiseled into their varies and graceful forms by the ceaseless action of countless waves. Nature is herself a great worker and never tolerates, without certain rebuke, any contradiction to her wise example. Inaction is followed by stagnation. Stagnation is followed by pestilence and pestilence is followed by death."
"I'm not an example for how people should live their lives. Never in my life would I ever set out to be an example for people on how to live their lives. If you need an example for how to live, then you just shouldn't have been born. Straight up."
"Example is the school of mankind, and they will learn at no other."
"Produce great men, the rest follows."
"When I so pressingly urge a strict observance of all the laws, let me not be understood as saying there are no bad laws, nor that grievances may not arise, for the redress of which, no legal provisions have been made. I mean to say no such thing. But I do mean to say, that, although bad laws, if they exist, should be repealed as soon as possible, still while they continue in force, for the sake of example, they should be religiously observed."
"Setting too good an Example is a Kind of slander seldom forgiven."
"Here's one truth that perhaps your typical investment counselor would disagree with: if you're comfortably rich and someone else is getting richer faster than you by, for example, investing in risky stocks, so what?! Someone will always be getting richer faster than you. This is not a tragedy."
"I have never had parents who set good examples, parents whose expectations were worth living up to, but she did. I can see them within her, the courage and the beauty they pressed into her like a handprint."
"If you must hold yourself up to your children as an object lesson, hold yourself up as a warning and not as an example."
"Example moves the world more than doctrine."
"Whoever wants to set a good example must add a grain of foolishness to his virtue: then others can imitate and yet at the same time surpass the one they imitate-which human beings love to do."
"a man is no example for a woman. It’s a different thing."
"Would you make men better - set them an example. The millenium will never come until governments cease from governing, and the meddler is at rest."
"So you never know who you touch. You never know how or when you'll have an impact, or how important your example can be to someone else" (20)."
