Quotes About Discernment

You've got to love what's lovable and hate what's hateable. It takes brains to see the difference.

Recognize the difference between a dream and a nightmare, and date the man from your dreams, not your nightmares.

He meant that we shall have an open mind, and not let a little truth check the rush of the big truth, like a small rock does a railway truck. We get the small truth first. Good! We keep him, and we value him, but all the same we must not let him think himself all the truth in the universe.

I guess Smart Seth is glad, he said reluctantly. But be careful. Idiot Seth is the guy to watch out for.

One eye is open to all truth, the other closed to all deception.

In case after case in the past, there is a kind of Bible-quoting intoxication under the influence of which we religious people lose the ability to distinguish between what God says and what we say God says.

Erasmus was like Serena in a sense: he frequently needed to prune and weed the human race in his own garden.

Knowledge is pitiless.

you cannot eat every tadpole and frog in the pond, but you can eat the biggest and ugliest one, and that will be enough, at least for the time being.

Your ability to choose between the important and the unimportant is the key determinant of your success in life and work.

This truly is the God of lesser glory, because of his lesser knowledge, lesser wisdom, lesser discernment, lesser ability, lesser reliability, and lesser guidance.

There would not be much left if every useful thing that could be turned to bad ends were destroyed.

A religion can be judged only on the basis of another religion.

As I have said, all of the cults and false religions combined have not done as much damage to the moves of God as the infiltration of the spirit of religion into the Church. Cults and false religions are easily discerned and discarded, but the religious spirit is extremely subtle. It has attempted to thwart possibly every revival or movement of God to date, and it still retains an undeserved seat of honor throughout a huge part of today's Church.

The western mind makes definitions; it draws lines.

An aesthete does not necessarily dress well or collect art works: an aesthete is one who lives by the eye.

It's like now that I'm looking for inequality, I'm seeing it everywhere, categorizing a thousand great and small unfairnesses everywhere I go. Why didn't I really see this before?

Beware what you consume, lest you appetite grow by what it feeds on.

If I finish a book a week, I will read only a few thousand books in my lifetime, about a tenth of a percent of the contents of the greatest libraries of our time. The trick is to know which books to read.

Knowing a great deal is not the same as being smart; intelligence is not information alone but also judgement, the manner in which information is coordinated and used.

Keeping an open mind is a virtue—but, as the space engineer James Oberg once said, not so open that your brains fall out.

What is called for is an exquisite balance between two conflicting needs: the most skeptical scrutiny of all hypotheses that are served up to us and at the same time a great openness to new ideas. If you are only skeptical, then no new ideas make it through to you. On the other hand, if you are open to the point of gullibility and have not an ounce of skeptical sense in you, then you cannot distinguish useful ideas from the worthless ones.

Gullibility kills.

Knowing a great deal is not the same as being smart; intelligence is not information alone but also judgement, the manner in which information is co-ordinated and used. Still, the amount of information to which we have accessed is one index of our intelligence.