Discerned Quotes & Sayings

Life is simply experience; for reasons not readily discerned, we attempt to go on. — Scott Turow

Years later, Taylor was inspecting the jails of the kingdom; and in the one at Nittur the ceiling had been covered, in barbaric colours, which time was subtilizing before erasing them, by a Muslim fakir's elaboration of a kind of infinite Tiger. This Tiger was composed of many tigers in the most vertiginous fashion : it was traversed by tigers, scored by tigers and it contained seas and Himalayas and armies which seemed to reveal still other tigers. The painter had died many years ago in this very cell; he had come from Sind, or maybe Guzerat, and his original purpose had been to design a map of the world. Indeed, some traces of this were yet to be discerned in the monstrous image ... — Jorge Luis Borges

Living wisdom cannot be confined within words, but it can be hinted at through situations, much as a specific feature of an otherwise undistinguished landscape can often be discerned by following the path projected by a pointing finger. "Them that have ears, let them hear," said Jesus; whoever "hears" the inner import of words will be able to "see" their inward meaning. — Robert Svoboda

The crucial distinction can be discerned by differentiating between deification, an ontological sharing in the Godhead in which the human literally becomes divine, and theosis, a participation in the life of God the Father through union with Jesus Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit which the human becomes truly human. — Marcus Peter Johnson

The next day, the villages came closer together until the beginnings and endings could no longer be discerned. — Patrick W. Carr

Courts are the mere instruments of the law, and can will nothing. When they are said to exercise a discretion, it is a mere legal discretion, a discretion to be exercised in discerning the course prescribed by law; and, when that is discerned, it is the duty of the Court to follow it. Judicial power is never exericised for the purpose of giving effect to the will of the Judge; always for the purpose of giving effect to the will of the Legislature; or, in other words, to the will of the law. — John Marshall

Search for the seed of good in every adversity. Master that principle and you will own a precious shield that will guard you well through all the darkest valleys you must traverse. Stars may be seen from the bottom of a deep well, when they cannot be discerned from the mountaintop. So will you learn things in adversity that you would never have discovered without trouble. There is always a seed of good. Find it and prosper. — Og Mandino

Man has no Body distinct from his soul; for that called Body is a portion of a Soul discerned by the five senses, the chief inlets of Soul in this age. — William Blake

O vanity, how little is thy force acknowledged or thy operations discerned! How wantonly dost thou deceive mankind under different disguises! Sometimes thou dost wear the face of pity; sometimes of generosity; nay, thou hast the assurance to put on those glorious ornaments which belong only to heroic virtue. — Henry Fielding

Strong emotions are present in all people. Without feeling, we would not be human. It's unnatural for man to hide what he's feeling, though if taught to do so, he can learn. Love teaches a man to show what he is feeling. Love never presupposes that it can be discerned or felt without expression ... — Leo Buscaglia

Invincibility is in oneself, and vulnerability is in the opponent. Invincibility is a matter of defense, vulnerability is a matter of attack. Therefore skillful warriors are able to be invincible, but they cannot cause opponents to be vulnerable. That is why it is said that victory is discerned and not manufactured. — Sun Tzu

By a symbol I do not mean an allegory or a sign, but an image that describes in the best possible way the dimly discerned nature of the spirit. A symbol does not define or explain; it points beyond itself to a meaning that is darkly divined yet still beyond our grasp, and cannot be adequately expressed in the familiar words of our language. — Carl Jung

Identity would seem to be the garment with which one covers the nakedness of the self: in which case, it is best that the garment be loose, a little like the robes of the desert, through which one's nakedness can always be felt, and, sometimes, discerned. This trust in one's nakedness is all that gives one the power to change one's robes. — James Baldwin

So that godly sorrow may be discerned by this train of graces wherewith it is accompanied, that worldly sorrow wants, at least in the truth of them, though it may have some shadows of them. — Thomas Hooker

In the preface to his great History of Europe, H. A. L. Fisher wrote: "Men wiser than and more learned than I have discerned in history a plot, a rhythm, a predetermined pattern. These harmonies are concealed from me. I can see only one emergency following upon another as wave follows upon wave ... " It seems to me that the same is true of the much older [geological stratigraphical] history of Europe. — D. V. Ager

You used to be able to tell a person's nationality by the face. Immigration ended that. Next you discerned nationality via the footwear. Globalization ended that. — Jeffrey Eugenides

Every age, Through being beheld too close, is ill-discerned By those who have not lived past it. — Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Stars may be seen from the bottom of a deep well, when they cannot be discerned from the top of a mountain. So are many things learned in adversity which the prosperous man [the man at ease] dreams not of. — Charles Spurgeon

I will never be able to say what is in my heart because words fail us, because it is in our nature to protect, because there are times when what is public and what is private must be discerned. — Terry Tempest Williams

The variety of colour in objects cannot be discerned at a great distance, excepting in those parts which are directly lighted up by the solar rays. — Leonardo Da Vinci

Happy Birthday.
Adrian came to a sudden halt. The words were soft and small, spoken tentatively, but easily discerned by vampire ears. Slowly, he turned around and found Jill Mastrano standing shyly before him. — Richelle Mead

Tapestries are made by many artisans working together. The contributions of separate workers cannot be discerned in the completed work, and the loose and false threads have been covered over. So it is in our picture of particle physics. — Sheldon L. Glashow

For as in nothing is a gentleman better to be discerned from a vulgar person, so in nothing is a gentle nation (such nations have been) better to be discerned from a mob, than in this, - that their feelings are constant and just, results of due contemplation, and of equal thought. You can talk a mob into anything; its feelings may be - usually are - on a whole, generous and right; but it has no foundation for them, no hold of them; you may tease or tickle it into any, at your pleasure; it thinks by infection, for the most part, catching an opinion like a cold, and there is nothing so little that it will not roar itself wild about, when the fit is on; nothing so great but it will forget in an hour, when the fit is past. — John Ruskin

Not one of the first six [U.S.] presidents was an orthodox Christian. Most of the founders were Deists, who "doubted that Christ was a god" and equated God with "the power behind nature, as discerned by science." — Robert Sherrill

Every advance in our acuteness of perception will show us something thing new; but the old and first-discerned thing will still be there, not falsified, only modified and enriched by the new perceptions, becoming continually more beautiful in its harmony with them, and more approved as a part of the infinite truth. — John Ruskin

There are times in history when the dark drums of God can barely be heard amid the noises of this world. Then it is only in moments of silence, which are rare and brief, that their beat can be faintly discerned. There are other times. These are the times when God is heard in rolling thunder, when the earth trembles and the treetops bend under the force of [God's] voice. It is not given to men [and women] to make God speak. It is only given to them to live and to think in such a way that, if God's thunder should come, they will not have stopped their ears. — Peter L. Berger

The Master and the boy followed each other as if drawn along the wires of some mechanism, until soon it could no longer be discerned which was coming and which going, which following and which leading, the old or the young man. Now it seemed to be the young man who showed honour and obedience to the old man, to authority and dignity; now again it was apparently the old man who was required to follow, serve, worship the figure of youth, of beginning, of mirth. And as he watched this at once senseless and significant dream circle, the dreamer felt alternately identical with the old man and the boy, now revering and now revered, now leading, now obeying; and in the course of these pendulum shifts there came a moment in which he was both, was simultaneously Master and small pupil; or rather he stood above both, was the instigator, conceiver, operator, and onlooker of the cycle, this futile spinning race between age and youth. — Hermann Hesse

Opposite the off-licence on Dockers Road, a car was parked on double-yellow lines. Hidden within the sunlight bouncing from its roof was the source of a frail tapping that defeated the din of the city. Squinting into that diamond of light, I discerned a blue tit crystallising from the glare. The little bird was pecking at its reflection. I wanted to tell it to stop. — Edward L. Lanner

Whatever is placed beyond the reach of sense and knowledge, whatever is imperfectly discerned, the fancy pieces out at its leisure; and all but the present moment, but the present spot, passion claims for its own, and brooding over it with wings outspread, stamps it with an image of itself. Passion is lord of infinite space, and distant objects please because they border on its confines and are moulded by its touch. — William Hazlitt

Heaven and God are best discerned through tears; scarcely perhaps are discerned at all without them. The constant association of prayer with the hour of bereavement and the scenes of death suffice to show this. — James Martineau

The eye observes only what the mind, the heart, and the imagination are gifted to see; and sight must be reinforced by insight before souls can be discerned as well as manners, ideas as well as objects, realities and relations as well as appearances and accidental connections. — Edwin Percy Whipple

If authority be required, let us appeal to Plutarch, the prince of ancient biographers. [Greek: Oute tais epiphanestatais praxesi pantos enesti daelosis aretaes ae kakias, alla pragma brachu pollakis, kai raema, kai paidia tis emphasin aethous epoiaesen mallon ae machai murionekroi, kai parataxeis ai megistai, kai poliorkiai poleon.] Nor is it always in the most distinguished atchievements that men's virtues or vices may be best discerned; but very often an action of small note, a short saying, or a jest, shall distinguish a person's real character more than the greatest sieges, or the most important battles. — Samuel Johnson

The natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God: for they are foolishness unto him: neither can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned. But he that is spiritual judgeth all things, yet he himself is judged of no man. — Paul The Apostle

Wordsworth had discerned a 'spirit' which was at one and the same time immanent in and distinct from natural phenomena:
'A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man:
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought
And rolls through all things. — Karen Armstrong

Afflictions, like bills and pikes, make a terrible show when they cannot reach us; but the temptations of prosperity, like unseen bullets, wound and kill us before they are discerned. — George Downame

Fight the good fight; and always call to mind that it is not you who are mortal, but this body of ours. For your true being is not discerned by perceiving your physical appearance. But 'what a man's mind is, that is what he is' not that individual human shape that we identify through our senses. — Samuel Pepys

It is by the mixture of counterfeit religion with true, not discerned and distinguished, that the devil has had his greatest advantage against the cause and kingdom of Christ, all along hitherto. It is by this means, principally, that he has prevailed against all revivings of religion, that ever have been since the first founding of the Christian church. — Jonathan Edwards

The petulance that relatives show towards each other is in truth directed against that intangible Causality which has shaped the situation no less for the offenders than the offended, but is too elusive to be discerned and cornered by poor humanity in irritated mood. — Thomas Hardy

The intense horror of nightmare came over me: I tried to draw back my arm, but the hand clung to it, and a most melancholy voice sobbed, 'Let me in - let me in!' 'Who are you?' I asked, struggling, meanwhile, to disengage myself. 'Catherine Linton,' it replied, shiveringly (why did I think of LINTON? I had read EARNSHAW twenty times for Linton) - 'I'm come home: I'd lost my way on the moor!' As it spoke, I discerned, obscurely, a child's face looking through the window. — Emily Bronte

(and thus on these evenings as the twilight softly fell and the terrace began to fill with chattering, beautifully dressed sophisticates,) I discerned in the shadows the faces of all the impossible heroes and heroines I had ever dreamed of since that moment when my hapless spirit had become entrapped by the magic of the printed word. — William Styron

Although a life-long fashion dropout, I have absorbed enough by reading Harper's Bazaar while waiting at the dentist's to have grasped that the purpose of fashion is to make A Statement. My own modest Statement, discerned by true cognoscenti, is, Woman Who Wears Clothes So She Won't Be Naked. — Molly Ivins

A careful blending of sarcasm, irony, and teasing, bickering has its own distinctive cadence and rhythm and is as difficult to master as French, Spanish, or any elective second language. Like Chinese, the fine points of bickering can be discerned in the subtle rise and fall of the voice. If not practiced properly, bickering can be mistaken for its less sophisticated counterpart: whining. — Linda Sunshine

Writer George Orwell confessed he found something "deeply appealing" about Adolf Hitler. Where Martha Dodd was struck by Hitler's "weak, soft face," Orwell discerned "a pathetic dog-like face, the face of a man suffering under intolerable wrongs." All this is a reminder that psychopaths have been known to possess engaging qualities, and that Hitler was no less repellent for not sporting fangs. — Brad Marchand

The pretended rights of these theorists are all extremes: and in proportion as they are metaphysically true, they are morally and politically false. The rights of men are in a sort of middle, incapable of definition, but not impossible to be discerned. The rights of men in government are their advantages; and these are often in balances between differences of good; in compromises between good and evil, and sometimes between evil and evil ... Men have no right to what is not reasonable, and to what is not for their benefit ... — Edmund Burke

The transitional nature of the 1920's can also be discerned in what may be labeled a new kind of 'dvoeverie' (or dual faith), a syncretistic belief that combined peasant ways and new Communist practices in tentative and uneasy assimilation. For example, there were reports of portraits of Lenin or Kalinin turning up in icon corners and of habit-ridden old peasants crossing themselves in front of these holy images. — Lynne Viola

Various polls have indicated that approximately 10% of Americans (25 million people) have seen them at close range so that details of the structure of the object can be discerned. — Steven M. Greer

For in the immediate world, everything is to be discerned, for him who can discern it, and central and simply, without either dissection into science, or digestion into art, but with the whole of consciousness, seeking to perceive it as it stands: so that the aspect of a street in sunlight can roar in the heart of itself as a symphony, perhaps as no symphony can: and all of consciousness is shifted from the imagined, the revisive, to the effort to perceive simply the cruel radiation of what is. — James Agee

There is a great difference between enlightenment and education. The former is a discerned vital knowledge without guidance while the latter is imparting any knowledge. — Uzoma Nnadi

She asked me if the schoolteacher and the horsemaster were still at odds, and by this I discerned that Burrich and Galen's challenge at the Witness Stones had become something of a local legend already. I assured her that peace had been restored. We spent — Robin Hobb

Leadership is learned, earned, and discerned. You develop it. It's based on trust and credibility. Others see it in you. You can't demand it. — Rick Warren

The same Being that fashioned the insect whose existence is only discerned by a microscope, and gave that invisible speck a system of ducts and other organs to perform its vital functions, created the enormous mass of the planet thirteen hundred times larger than our earth, and launched it in its course round the sun, and the comet, wheeling with a velocity that would carry it round our globe in less than two minutes of time, and yet revolving through so prodigious a space that it takes near six centuries to encircle the sun! — Henry Brougham, 1st Baron Brougham And Vaux

Pantheism differs from the systems of belief constituting the main religions of the world in being comparatively free from any limits of period, climate, or race. For while what we roughly call the Egyptian Religion, the Vedic Religion, the Greek Religion, Buddhism, and others of similar fame have been necessarily local and temporary, Pantheism has been, for the most part, a dimly discerned background, an esoteric significance of many or all religions, rather than a "denomination" by itself. The best illustration of this characteristic of Pantheism is the catholicity of its great prophet Spinoza. For he felt so little antagonism to any Christian sect, that he never urged any member of a church to leave it, but rather encouraged his humbler friends, who sought his advice, to make full use of such spiritual privileges as they appreciated most. — J. ALLANSON PICTON

Men wiser and more learned than I have discerned in history a plot, a rhythm, a predetermined pattern. These harmonies are concealed from me. I can see only one emergency following upon another as wave follows upon wave, only one great fact with respect to which, since it is unique, there can be no generalizations; only one safe rule for the historian: that he should recognize in the development of human destinies the play of the contingent and the unforeseen. — H.A.L. Fisher

If the juices of the body were more chymically examined, especially by a naturalist, that knows the ways of making fixed bodies volatile, and volatile fixed, and knows the power of the open air in promoting the former of those operations; it is not improbable, that both many things relating to the nature of the humours, and to the ways of sweetening, actuating, and otherwise altering them, may be detected, and the importance of such discoveries may be discerned. — Robert Boyle

And it was in the mitigated midnight of these approximations that she had discerned the promise of her dawn. — Henry James

A free man is one who has discerned the inanity of all points of view; a liberated man is one who has drawn the consequences of such discernment. — Emil M. Cioran

In all matters of eternal truth, the soul is before the intellect; the things of God are spiritually discerned. You know truth by being true; you recognize God by being like Him. — Frederick William Robertson

... I suddenly discerned at my feet, crouching among the rocks for protection against the heat, the marine goddesses for whom Elstir had lain in wait and whom he had surprised there, beneath the dark glaze as lovely as Leonardo would have painted, the marvelous Shadows, sheltering furtively, nimble and silent, ready at the first glimmer of light to slip behind the stone, to hide in a cranny, and prompt, once the menacing ray had passed, to return to the rock or the seaweed over whose torpid slumbers they seemed to be keeping vigil, beneath the sun that crumbled the cliffs and the etiolated ocean, motionless lightfoot guardians darkening the water's surface with their viscous bodies and the attentive gaze of their deep blue eyes. — Marcel Proust

The sensation was part of the general strangeness that made him feel like a man waking from a long sleep to find himself in an unknown country among people of alien tongue. We live in our own souls as in an unmapped region, a few acres of which we have cleared for our habitation; while of the nature of those nearest us we know but the boundaries that march with ours. Of the points in his wife's character not in direct contact with his own, Glennard now discerned his ignorance; and the baffling sense of her remoteness was intensified by the discovery that, in one way, she was closer to him than ever before. As one may live for years in happy unconsciousness of the possession of a sensitive nerve, he had lived beside his wife unaware that her individuality had become a part of the texture of his life, ineradicable as some growth on a vital organ; and he now felt himself at once incapable of forecasting her judgment and powerless to evade its effects. — Edith Wharton

The actors of the era knew they were excommunicated. Entering the profession amounted to choosing Hell. And the Church discerned in them her worst enemies. — Albert Camus

Sometimes there are moments in life that defy human reasoning; unique occurrences that simply cannot properly be resolved with the natural mind. So it's only when one reaches further than themselves, and out into the unseen realm of faith, that life's most miraculous moments can
truly be discerned. For it is in these moments that God is making more known the reality of His existence; and more known to we who believe, the greatness of His power and love. — Calvin W. Allison

What I discerned in the U.S. was a convergence of poetic voices coming from many different rents in the social fabric, many cultures, many tributaries, which, together, make up the American poetry of the late twentieth century. — Adrienne Rich

There is no such thing as immaterial matter. All spirit is matter, but is more fine or pure, and can only be discerned by purer eyes. We cannot see it, but when our bodies are purified, we shall see that it is all matter. — Joseph Smith Jr.

Generational change within a genre is hard to parse while it's happening. Only in retrospect can the passing of the baton from ancestors to progeny be clearly discerned. — Paul Di Filippo

Simplicity is something more, something other than just doing without or doing it yourself. Its essence is neither forsaking nor striving. Its essence, rather, is listening: What has God put in your heart? Simplicity is, once having discerned that, being content with it. Simplifying it further: simplicity is being content with God. — Mark Buchanan

There is, monks, an unborn, unbecome, unmade, unconditioned. If, monks, there were no unborn ... no escape would be discerned from what is born, become, made, conditioned. But because there is an unborn ... , therefore an escape is discerned from what is born, become, made, conditioned. — Gautama Buddha

When the Islamic revolution began in 1979 under the leadership of Ayatollah Khomeini, it aroused considerable admiration in the Arab street. It presented a model of organised popular action that deposed one of the region's most tyrannical regimes. The people of the region discerned in this revolution new hope for freedom and change. — Wadah Khanfar

Perhaps one day the dreams of Utopists may be realized and humanity will shake off the chains of materialism which still separate us from what we think to be supernatural knowledge, but which, in reality, is already in us, only waiting to be discerned. — Emile Coue

How long in that same fit I lay, I have not to declare; But ere my living life returned, I heard and in my soul discerned Two VOICES in the air. "Is it he?" quoth one, "Is this the man? By him who died on cross, With his cruel bow he laid full low, The harmless Albatross. "The spirit who bideth by himself In the land of mist and snow, He loved the bird that loved the man Who shot him with his bow." The other was a softer voice, As soft as honey-dew: Quoth he, "The man hath penance done, And penance more will do. — Samuel Taylor Coleridge

They journeyed a long time and found nothing. At length they discerned a small light, which was the Earth ... But they could not find the smallest reason to suspect that we and our fellow citizens of this globe have the honor to exist. — Anonymous

Returning to the One' is for the heart to be in the One. It is cutting off and breaking away from attachment to external things, so that the self's seeking, loving, knowledge, and discernment are cut off and broken away from all that is sought after, all that is loved, all that is known, and all that is discerned (other than the One). (Then) there will only be an awareness of the Lord, and this awareness of the Lord is non-awareness. — Liu Chih

In an age that valued prolonged and detailed exposition, complexity, and repetition it was astonishing that Luther should have instinctively discerned the value of brevity. — Andrew Pettegree

It is in the relaxation of security; it is in the expansion of prosperity; it is in the hour of dilatation of the heart, and of its softening into festivity and pleasure, that the real character of men is discerned. — Edmund Burke

Perhaps if the future existed, concretely and individually, as something that could be discerned by a better brain, the past would not be so seductive: its demands would be balanced by those of the future. — Vladimir Nabokov

God's intentions could be discerned by the careful study of even the smallest, most seemingly insignificant events. And the past weeks' events were anything but small and insignificant. — Ann Leckie

The way of fortune is like the milkyway in the sky; which is a number of small stars, not seen asunder, but giving light together: so it is a number of little and scarce discerned virtues, or rather faculties and customs, that make men fortunate. — Francis Bacon

As masters of the bond market, the Rothschilds were already more feared than loved. Reactionaries on the Right lamented the rise of a new form of wealth, higher-yielding and more liquid than the landed estates of Europe's aristocratic elites. As Heinrich Heine discerned, there was something profoundly revolutionary about the financial system the Rothschilds were creating: — Niall Ferguson

We ought to care for those closest to us in terms of relatedness. After our immediate family, we ought to pursue our calling diligently as employees and provide just incentives (perhaps through profit-sharing) and reasonable care for our workers as employers. We should seek the wisdom of teachers and elders in society and look to them for leadership, while rejecting their folly when it is discerned. We must put our children and their education, both at home and in school, before our own entertainment, pleasure, and success. We ought not to tolerate insolence or haughtiness in them; nor ought we to punish them too severely, but should lead them as good teachers, by example and patient instruction. — Michael S. Horton

It created a murmur of voices, from which no single word could be discerned. Instead, it synthesized the sound of bees buzzing around in a mad swarm, angered by a breach of their hive. — Ashley DiMuzio

Nothing worthy can be built on a neglect of higher meanings and on a relativistic view of concepts and culture as a whole. Indeed, something greater than a phenomenon confined to art can be discerned shimmering here beneath the surface - shimmering not with light but with an ominous crimson glow. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

His architecture was butch. But in its muscular austerity, free of domesticating bric-a-brac, a hyper masculine form of drag could also be discerned. His occasional incorporation of vintage porthole windows, stained glass, and Palladian transoms offered a wry, backward glance at all the new generation was leaving behind. — Christopher Bascom Rawlins

It is almost impossible to understand the extent to which upheaval agitated, and by that very fact had temporarily enriched, the mind of M. de Charlus. Love in this way produces real geological upheavals of thought. In the mind of M. de Charlus, which only several days before resembled a plane so flat that even from a good vantage point one could not have discerned an idea sticking up above the ground, a mountain range had abruptly thrust itself into view, hard as rock
but mountains sculpted as if an artist, instead of taking the marble away, had worked it on the spot, and where there twisted about one another, in giant and swollen groupings, Rage, Jealousy, Curiosity, Envy, Suffering, Pride, Astonishment, and Love. — Marcel Proust

On Wednesday, July 19, the Council, having gleaned and discerned, released its official verdict: the fall of the tile bearing the letter "Z" constitutes the terrestrial manifestation of an empyrean Nollopian desire, that desire most surely being that the letter "Z" should be utterly excised
fully extirpated
absolutively heave-ho'ed from our communal vocabulary! — Mark Dunn

Understanding created by the intellect cannot be acquired by means of the occult, only by the aid of the zodiac, bringing forth that small flame by whose light part of the future may be discerned. — Nostradamus

The difference of the English and Irish character is nowhere more plainly discerned than in their respective kitchens. With the former, this apartment is probably the cleanest, and certainly the most orderly, in the house ... An Irish kitchenis usually a temple dedicated to the goddess of disorder; and, too often, joined with her, is the potent deity of dirt. — Anthony Trollope

It is the moral anesthetic of our day to ask God and our friends to only understand our sin from our point of view. This mind-set of seeing sin from a personal point of view has led to, at best, weak Christians crippled by sin and untouched by gospel power, or at worst, wolves in sheep's clothing who hunker down with offices in the church, teaching feeble sheep a perverted catechism, one that renders sin grace and grace sin, one that confuses doubt with intelligence and skepticism with renewed hope. When we live by the belief that sin is best discerned from our own point of view, we cannot help but to develop a theology of excuse-righteousness. We become anesthetized to the reality of our own sin. One consequence of this moral anesthesia is the belief that you are in good standing with God if you give to him what the desires of your flesh can spare. But sin, biblically rendered, is both a crime and a disease, requiring both the law of God and his grace to apply it for true help. — Rosaria Champagne Butterfield

But the natural man receives not the things of the Spirit of God: for they are foolishness unto him: neither can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned" (1 Corinthians 2:14). God and His Word, in essence or essential nature, is truth (Deuteronomy 32:4; Psalms 5:5; 33:4; 105:5; 119:151, 160; John 1:17; 14:6; 16:13). Many Christians consider all truth as God's truth, yet they will look to other sources beyond the Bible. However, the only reliable source of truth is God's inerrant Word, the Bible (Psalm 18:30; John 8:31-32; 2 Timothy 3:16-17). All other sources are fallible and cannot be used as the measure for truth. — Paul Smith

The stranger was still smiling. He transformed himself into a rose bush and entwined me. My Christian education meant that ever since childhood I have had a horror of vice and it was not without a quite understandable terror that I discerned the pleasure I felt in the embrace of this vigorous bush whose branches gradually mingled with my limbs, my hair and my looks. When one of its flowers came apart in my mouth, I could feel myself grasping the sorcerer in my arms in my turn. He was transformed into a torrent, and I was a barge, into desert and I was smoke, into a car and I was a road, into a man and I was a woman. 'What we are doing is very wrong,' he said and was off. — Robert Desnos

We do not refuse to remember; neither do we find it exactly useless to remember. Rather, we are being rendered unfit to remember. For if remembering is to be something more than nostalgia, it requires a contextual basis - a theory, a vision, a metaphor - something within which facts can be organized and patterns discerned. — Neil Postman

Over the years, I have become convinced that Hellenism as a culture represents not a static condition of uniform sublimity mysteriously achieved and maintained as an effect of some racial advantage. Rather it should be understood as an evolving process, governed by a dynamic of change, as both language and thought underwent transformational alteration caused by a transition from orality to literacy. The instrument of change is discerned to be the invention of the Greek alphabet, at a quite late stage in the history of developing cultures. — Eric A. Havelock

She, whose life had blown up, emptying her of history and leaving in its place only that dark dream of majesty, that illusion so powerful that it demanded to enter the sphere of what-was-real - she, rootless Bilquis, who now longed for stability, for no-more-explosions, had discerned in Raza a boulder-like quality on which she would build her life. He was a man rooted solidly in an indeflectible sense of himself, and that made him seem invincible. — Salman Rushdie

Perhaps her faults and follies, the unhappiness she had suffered, were not entirely vain if she could follow the path that now she dimly discerned before her, not the path that kind funny old Waddington had spoken of that led nowhither, but the path those dear nuns at the convent followed so humbly, the path that led to peace. — W. Somerset Maugham

There were two gentleman seated by it talking in French;impossible to follow their rapid utterance, or comprehend much of the purport of what they said ... yet French, in the mouths of Frenchmen or Belgians ( ... ), was as music to my ears. One of these gentlemen presently discerned me to be an Englishman - no doubt from the fashion in which I addressed the waiter; for I would persist in speaking French in my execrable South-of-England style, though the man understood English. The gentleman, after looking towards me once or twice ,politely accosted me in very good English; I remember I wish to God that I could speak French as well; his fluency and correct pronunciation impressed me for the first time with a due notion of the cosmopolitan character of the capital I was in, it was my first experience of that skill in living languages I afterwards found to be so general in Brussels. — Charlotte Bronte

Parts are not to be examined till the whole has been surveyed; there is a kind of intellectual remoteness necessary for the comprehension of any great work in its full design and its true proportions; a close approach shews the smaller niceties, but the beauty of the whole is discerned no longer. — Samuel Johnson

Gradually, after being the target a few times of a similar capriciousness, which he discerned as default behavior for most people, and not liking it, Paul learned to not be more generous or enthusiastic or attentive that he could sustain regardless of his mood and to not talk to people if his only reason to was because he felt lonely or bored. — Tao Lin

Justification is the act of God about us and is not easily discerned by others. Sanctification is the work of God within us and cannot be hid — J.C. Ryle

They quickly discerned the advantages of utilizing columns of numbers or place numbers in the style of Arabic numerals, and they introduced the use of zero, negative numbers, and algebra in China. — Jack Weatherford

The public mind [is] a cloudy region where only the simplest shapes are discerned with any accuracy. — Hugh Kingsmill

What we see as risk and foolhardiness on the outside, can seem more like constant cohesive drive on the inside that holds to priorities that cannot be discerned by others, because they reside in far too private a chamber of personal experience to be shared easily. To dare everything is not necessarily trouble, but often the opposite. To have faith in a foundation you have discovered in life and which, though it is difficult to describe even to yourself, you refuse to relinquish. — David Whyte

For a girl, appearance can be a powerful form of oppression. No matter how intelligent a girl may be, no matter her many talents, these attributes are not easily discerned. Brains and talent will never stand up against a girl who is clearly physically attractive. — Natsuo Kirino