Quotes About Discernment

And you need to know what you're saying no to.

There are many ways to tell if someone is a bit thick. You can sit them in a room and ask them to push various bits of plastic into a wooden box. Or you can ask them to describe a cloud. Or you can carefully measure the distance between their eyes, the height of their forehead or the length of their arm.

holy men only know what God reveals to them.

Take Care not to have an itching tongue, nor tingling ears; neither attract others, nor listen to backbiters. [Letter to Nepotian]

It is a wise man who knows where courage ends and stupidity begins.

Bert, whenever you see something bright, shining, perfect-seeming - all gold, with purple spots - look behind the paint! And if it's a lie - show it up for what it really is!

While none of us will ever speak to anyone with Jesus' full knowledge of people, we are to pray for the gift of discernment; and we are to give ourselves to the task of loving people well enough that we will desire to get to know them and so be able to speak with wisdom to their struggles, hurts, weaknesses, failings, and needs.

The sin of worldliness is a preoccupation with the things of this temporal life. It's accepting and going along with the views and practices of society around us without discerning if they are biblical. I believe that the key to our tendencies toward worldliness lies primarily in the two words "going along". We simply go along with the values and practices of society.

Don't believe everything you think. You cannot be trusted to tell yourself the truth. Stay in The Word." (The Great Exchange)

When I was a kid, I could taste the difference between different colored M&Ms. I thought the red was heartier, more of a main course M&M. And the light brown was a mellower, kind of after-dinner M.

I'd been thirteen, not stupid, though a lot of people confuse the two.

Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures.

Much of the deep depression that surrounds us in life has to do with this one thing — that we can't even see the smallest plainest objects.

All a person needs to do is observe what the market is telling him and evaluate it.

As a rule, when we can't find even one good quality in a person, we are prejudiced, and by that rule I must admit my prejudice.

What we call the wisdom that comes with age is usually simple caution.

The challenge for all of us in this day and age is to distinguish between the merely surprising and the truly amazing.

The capacity to see and—equally so—blindness are not divisible. The critical faculty of the human mind is one: To believe one can be seeing internally but blind as far as the outside world is concerned is like saying that the light of a candle gives light only in one direction and not in all. The light of the candle is reason's capacity for critical, penetrating, uncovering thought.

El pensamiento crítico es la única arma y la única defensa que tiene el ser humano frente a los peligros de la vida. Porque si yo no pienso críticamente, estaré sujeto a todas las influencias, a todas las sugerencias, a todos los errores y a todas las mentiras que se difunden, y con lo que me han adoctrinado desde pequeño. (...)

Even to begin to understand the problem of faith one must differentiate between rational and irrational faith.

We had fancied our task would be different, only to find we were to be trained for heroism as though we were circus-ponies. But we soon accustomed ourselves to it. We learned in fact that some of these things were necessary, but the rest merely show. Soldiers have a fine nose for such distinctions.

Dodd resigned himself to what he called "the delicate work of watching and carefully doing nothing.

Remember everything is right until it's wrong. You'll know when it's wrong.

You should only read what is truly good or what is frankly bad.