Quotes About Discernment

Goodness without wisdom always accomplishes evil.

Listen sharp, think deep, and guard your tongue- Tam al'Thor

This was not the first time she had squeezed meanings from his words that he never knew were in them.

When a woman plays the fool, look for the man.

You did not rise in the ships just through your ability to Weave the Winds or predict the weather or fix a position. You needed to read the intent that lay between the words of your orders, to interpret small gestures and facial expressions; you had to notice who deferred to whom, even subtly, for courage and ability alone took you only so high.

He strains to hear a whisper who refuses to hear a shout.

Letting emotions go clouds judgment for a moment, but holding them in clouds it always. Just

The Light save me from men who think with the hair on their chests. Though I don't know as there are any other kind.

No son espadas ni fuerza muscular lo que necesitamos ahora —discrepó Nynaeve—, sino inteligencia. Los hombres suelen pensar con el pelo que tienen en el pecho. —Se tocó el pecho con aire ausente, como si palpara algo debajo de la chaqueta—. La mayoría de ellos lo hacen.

it seemed to him that he felt one pair of eyes in particular, someone staring not at Moiraine and Loial, but at him. He picked her out immediately. For one thing, she stood apart from the others, and for another she was the only woman in the room not wearing at least a little lace. Her dark gray, almost black, dress was as plain as the ship captains' clothes, with wide sleeves and narrow skirts, and never a frill or stitch of fancy-work.

that you should believe nothing you hear, and only half of what you see.

You must learn there is a time to speak all of the truth, and a time to govern your tongue. The least of the lessons you must learn, but important, if you mean to live long enough to wear the shawl of a full sister.

Moiraine had been taught to judge people's capabilities long before she left home.

Women seemed to make up their minds whether you were lying without looking at the evidence. On the other hand, if they liked you, they either did not care or else decided even the most outrageous lie was true.

A baffled look passed between Nynaeve and Elayne. What was his point? Everyone knew that a man did not achieve his proper wits, such as they were, until ten years later than a woman.

Intelligence is the ability to take information and make it meaningful.

How does the man accessing the Warrior know what aggressiveness is appropriate under the circumstances? He knows through clarity of thinking, through discernment. The warrior is always alert. He is always awake. He is never sleeping through life. He knows how to focus his mind and his body. He is what the samurai called "mindful." He is a "hunter" in the Native American tradition.

But it's better to know a lot and say little, I think, than know a little and say a lot.

What's new?" is an interesting and broadening eternal question, but one which, if pursued exclusively, results only in an endless parade of trivia and fashion, the silt of tomorrow. I would like, instead, to be concerned with the question "What is best?," a question which cuts deeply rather than broadly, a question whose answers tend to move the silt downstream.

The difference between a good mechanic and a bad one, like the difference between a good mathematician and a bad one, is precisely this ability to select the good facts from the bad ones on the basis of quality.

If you want to build a factory, or fix a motorcycle, or set a nation right without getting stuck, then classical, structured, dualistic subject-object knowledge, although necessary, isn't enough. You have to have some feeling for the quality of the work. You have to have a sense of what's good.

And what is good, and what is not good- need we ask anyone to tell us this things?

Squareness may be succinctly and yet thoroughly defined as an inability to see quality before it's been intellectually defined

Was Quality something that you "just see" or might it be something more subtle than that, so that you wouldn't see it at all immediately, but only after a long period of time?