Unconditional parenting: Moving from Rewards and Punishments to Love and Reason
Rewards and punishments, to speak frankly, are the desk of the soul, that is, a means of enslaving a child's spirit, and better suited to provoke than to prevent deformities.
What punishments of God are not gifts?
The school was prone to dishing out punishments for anything creative that didn't fit with expectation - I just followed the logic and figured the folk club was probably much the same.
People interpret things through their owns lens, just the way they do the Bible. You can find justification for just about everything in the Bible. I think man has got a great ego when it comes to his God, whatever that is. It just seems to me that someone who wants to take on God's punishment, it just seems a huge egoism to think that he should appoint himself to take care of God's punishments.
So far as I am concerned, poetry and every other art was and is and forever will be strictly and distinctly a question of individuality. . . If poetry is your goal, you've got to forget all about punishments and all about rewards and all about self-styled obligations and duties and responsibilities etcetera ad infinitum and remember one thing only: that it's you - nobody else - who determine your destiny and decide your fate. Nobody else can be alive for you; nor can you be alive for anybody else. . . There's the artist's responsibility; and the most awful responsibility on earth.
Punishments erode relationships and moral growth.
Too frequent rewards indicate that the general is at the end of his resources; too frequent punishments that he is in acute distress.
The past, with its pleasures, its rewards, its foolishness, its punishments, is there for each of us forever, and it should be.
When character is lost, rules and punishments cannot take its place.
One of the principal functions of a friend is to suffer (in a milder and symbolic form) the punishments that we should like, but are unable, to inflict upon our enemies.
Should one be shallow enough to view existence as a system of rewards and punishments, one soon learns that we pay as dearly for our triumphs as we do for our defeats.
Nations like individuals are subjected to punishments and chastisements in this world.
Lead the people with administrative injunctions and put them in their place with penal law, and they will avoid punishments but will be without a sense of shame. Lead them with excellence and put them in their place through roles and ritual practices, and in addition to developing a sense of shame, they will order themselves harmoniously
Two of the cruelest, most primitive punishments our town deals out to those who have fallen from favor are the empty mailbox and the silent telephone.
Some things come with their own punishments.
In nature there are neither rewards nor punishments; there are consequences.
Man has free choice, or otherwise counsels, exhortations, commands, prohibitions, rewards and punishments would be in vain.
You may do as you wish without fear of retribution. It may serve you, however, to be aware of consequences. Consequences are results. Natural outcomes. These are not at all the same as retributions, or punishments. Outcomes are simply that. They are what results from the natural application of natural laws. They are that which occurs, quite predictably, as a consequence of what has occurred.
So called pleasures, when they go beyond a certain limit, are but punishments.
