Quotes About Discernment

The heart is deceitful above all things, / And it is incurable; / Who can know it?" (17:9).

You, oh mature ones, keep company solely with other mature ones, and your maturity is so mature that it can only chum up with maturity!

One cool judgement is worth a dozen hasty councils. The thing to do is to supply light and not heat.

One cool judgment is worth a thousand hasty counsels. The thing to do is to supply light and not heat.

One cool judgment is worth a dozen hasty councils. The thing to do is to supply light and not heat.

How is the schoolmaster, the nation, to know which boy needs the whipping?

Goodness is easier to recognize than to define.

It takes a wise man to recognize a wise man.

When people try to lie there are little things that betray the truth.

the Irish priests sometimes considered their French-Canadian counterparts primitives.)

When we make judgements about things based on appearance, instead of on what really matters, we get into trouble.

not all sense is common.

Just because somebody smiles when he hands me a bag of shit, that doesn't mean I have to take it. I don't give a damn how friendly he is. It's what he does that matters.

If you have to keep a secret it's because you shouldn't be doing it in the first place

If evangelical gatekeepers can swallow keeping children in cages, mocking the Sermon on the Mount, and following leaders in thrall to Trumpist bigotry, why would anyone respect their discernment, value their praise, or fear their critique?

I am saying that Christians have many resources for listening to God's voice and discerning God's will. But given human limits—even as humans with Jesus in front of us, the Bible open before us, and the Spirit within us—I am rejecting any inerrant path to infallible doctrine.

What it means is that individual effort, individual discernment, individual choice can have huge effects in averting the catastrophes that might otherwise sweep through a herd.

she also tended to see strangers not as individuals but as representatives of types. It was as though people did not walk around in the world as themselves, but as examples of kinds of people, the majority of whom they had never met.

Once we love ourselves, people no longer look good to us unless they are good for us.

The hardest thing to learn in life is which bridge to cross and which bridge to burn

Like all of my friends, she's a lousy judge of character.

Like all of my friends, she's a lousy judge of character.

Yet i say to you, do not rush to marriage for it is a deep and perfect thing. Test first, that you may be certain you are called to it by love, and not simply by pleasures of the flesh which will consume themselves and leave only ashes and misery

That is how the human brain works, when it looks at a formless cloud, it tries to see a shape, or a face, or otherwise associate it with something that makes sense in some known cultural context, like the proverbial image of the Virgin Mary seen in the grain of a tree stump, or a slice of toast. But make no mistake—the observer supplies the face.