Quotes about Discernment

To dash a half-truth in the world's eyes is the surest way of blinding it altogether.

Education must enable one to sift and weigh evidence, to discern the true from the false, the real from the unreal, and the facts from the fiction.

You have all the cleverness which makes a successful man. Have you the tact?

But a girl always knows.

a man's brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose. A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort that he comes across, so that the knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out, or at best is jumbled up with a lot of other things so that he has a difficulty in laying his hands upon it.

One can never read too little of bad, or too much of good books: bad books are intellectual poison; they destroy the mind.

Bad books are intellectual poison; they destroy the mind. In order to read what is good one must make it a condition never to read what is bad; for life is short, and both time and strength limited.

There is an important difference between openness and naïveté. Not everyone has good intentions nor means me well. I remind myself I do not need to change these people, only recognize who they are.

God give me patience, to reconcile with what I am not able to changeGive me strength to change what I canAnd give me wisdom to distinguish one from another.

There are always two sides to every story, and it is generally wise, and safe, and charitable, to take the best; and yet there is probably no one way in which persons are so liable to be wrong, as in presuming the worst is true, and in forming and expressing their judgement of others, and of their actions, without waiting till all the truth is known.

There is a difference between having a rational judgment that honey is sweet, and having a sense of its sweetness. . . . So there is a difference between believing that a person is beautiful, and having a sense of his beauty. The former may be obtained by hearsay, but the lat- ter only by seeing the countenance.

It is by the mixture of counterfeit religion with true, not discerned and distinguished, that the devil has had his greatest advantage against the cause and kingdom of Christ, all along hitherto.