Quotes About Discernment

An education isn't how much you have committed to memory, or even how much you know. It's being able to differentiate between what you know and what you don't.

As to the kind of truth one finds in books, it is a truth that enables us sometimes to discern what things are not, without ever enabling us to discover what they are.

For you can always tell the gods by their appetite.

An education isn't how much you have committed to memory, or even how much you know. It's being able to differentiate between what you do know and what you don't.

God created for you two eyes and two ears but one tongue so that you say half what you see and hear.

God created two noses: one smells loyalty and the other smells treasury and the mind between them to judge.

Intellectually, true beauty is very difficult to distinguish a priori from the bloom of youth.

Juger c'est, de toute évidence ne pas comprendre puisque, si l'on comprenait, on ne pourrait pas juger.

People judge what they do not understand

I have my own virtue, which I am constantly cultivating and refining by teaching myself not to tolerate in me or my surroundings anything but the exquisite.

To be witty is not enough. One must possess sufficient wit to avoid having too much of it.

There is no greater fool than the fool that cannot recognize another. Andreas Simic

Those who would administer wisely must, indeed, be wise, for one of the serious obstacles to the improvement of our race is indiscriminate charity.

So we might say that the most important thing one can acquire in college is a well-functioning bullshit meter.

I have little tolerance for noise and stupidity.

I decided to give up the idea of being a priest before I decided I wanted to be an actor. I considered it for a couple of weeks, really. I'm a young Catholic, do you know what I mean. You're going to consider it.

Having grown up as a young Army officer in the Vietnam era, I had an instinctual sort of notion that you have to look very carefully and weigh very carefully what anyone says.

Hyperbole is not easily dealt with. Usually, it collapses under its own weight.

It's not hard to figure out when you're not welcome.

When you're 14, anything with a sword and a dragon is pretty cool. But when you're 21 and you've read 2,000 fantasy novels, you start to realize that some of those books, well, they weren't really good. OK, let's be honest. A lot of them were crap.

The difference between stupid and intelligent people - and this is true whether or not they are well-educated - is that intelligent people can handle subtlety.

The real war is not between the West and the East. The real war is between intelligent and stupid people.

I wouldn't say when you've seen one Western you've seen the lot; but when you've seen the lot you get the feeling you've seen one.

We should never rush into folly just because other nations are practicing it.