Discerns Quotes & Sayings

I'm a coward. A willing coward, complicit in my own fall. I've never told him that I love him, as if refusing to say it aloud would somehow shield us both, but it hasn't. Like an untamed, sentient thing, full of I am and yet estranged from me, my heart discerns its own truth and knows that this omission is a lie. — Tammara Webber

The greatness of common sense, and its title to reverence, appear in this, that it deals with vast complexity, that is, with the innumerable elements of a situation. Common sense discerns and judges a path through this knotted and tangled maze. — James Vila Blake

I do not agree or disagree in everything with either one party or the other. Because all seem to me to have some truth and some error, but everyone recognizes the other's error and nobody discerns his own. — Michael Servetus

Brutes gaze on sights, they are arrested by sounds; and what they see and what they hear are sights and sounds only. The intellectof man, on the contrary, energises as well as his eye or ear, and perceives in sights or sounds something beyond them. It seizes and unites what the senses present to it; it grasps and forms what need not be seen or heard except in detail. It discerns in lines and colors, or in tones, what is beautiful and what is not. It gives them a meaning, and invests them with an idea. — John Henry Newman

thambos, "that reverential terror and awe aroused by the proximity of any supernatural force or being which one discerns, — Eric Weiner

Wise is the man who learns the nonverbal language of his wife, who notes the nod and discerns the gestures. It's not just what is said, but how. It's not just how, but when. It's not just when, but where. Good husbanding is good decoding. You've got to read the signs. — Max Lucado

God might grant us riches, honours, life, and even health, to our own hurt; for every thing that is pleasing to us is not always good for us. If he sends us death, or an increase of sickness, instead of a cure, Vvrga tua et baculus, tuus ipsa me consolata sunt. "Thy rod and thy staff have comforted me," he does it by the rule of his providence, which better and more certainly discerns what is proper for us than we can do; and we ought to take it in good part, as coming from a wise and most friendly hand. — Michel De Montaigne

The spirit of a people, its cultural level, its social structure, the deeds its policy may prepare - all this and more is written in its fiscal history, stripped of all phrases. He who knows how to listen to its message here discerns the thunder of world history more clearly than anywhere else. — Joseph A. Schumpeter

And so he who looks down at his feet will not know the truth, but he who discerns by the sun which way to go. — Leo Tolstoy

O flowers, country, love, inaction,
O fields! I am your devotee!
I always note with satisfaction
Onegin's difference from me,
Lest somewhere a sarcastic reader
Or publisher or such-like breeder
Of complicated calumny
Discerns my physiognomy
And shamelessly repeats the fable
That I have crudely versified
Myself like Byron, bard of pride,
As if we were no longer able
To write a poem and discuss
A subject not concerning us. — Alexander Pushkin

A tendency to speculation, though it may keep woman quiet, as it does man, yet makes her sad. She discerns, it may be, such a hopeless task before her. — Nathaniel Hawthorne

The good neighbor looks beyond the external accidents and discerns those inner qualities that make all men human and, therefore, brothers. — Martin Luther King Jr.

A writer has a use for his experiences that most civilians simply don't; he or she discerns material in situations that others simply live through. Perhaps there are some who disapprove of this, but without this double consciousness, literature would not get made at all. — Walter Kirn

Thinking

Thinking is passing from the false to the true
and seeing the Absolute Whole in the part.
When the idea enters the mind,
it is a reminiscence of a former state,
and passes on to interpretation.

. . . He who sees by illumination
discerns God first in everything.
But he who sees by logic only,
and seeks to prove the necessary,
is bewildered and sometimes travels
backward in a circle, or is imprisoned
in a chain of proofs.
Fool! He seeks the dazzling sun
by the dim light of a candle in the desert. — Mahmud Shabistari

Paradoxically, the more deeply one grows in enlightenment, the more clearly one discerns one's own frailties and limitations. — Kim Hee-jin

There is the moment when the silence of the countryside gathers in the ear and breaks into a myriad of sounds:a croaking and squeaking, a swift rustle in the grass, a plop in the water, a pattering on earth and pebbles, and high above all, the call of the cicada, The sounds follow one another, and the ear eventually discerns more and more of them -just as fingers unwinding a ball of wool feel each fiber interwoven with progressively thinner and less palpable threads, The frogs continue croaking in the background without changing the flow of sounds, just as light does not vary from the continues winking of stars, But at every rise or fall of the wind every sound changes and is renewed. All that remains in the inner recess of the ear is a vague murmur: the sea. — Italo Calvino

The man who succeeds above his fellows is the one who early in life clearly discerns his object, and towards that object habitually directs his powers. — Earl Nightingale

Phidias and the achievements of Greek art are foreshadowed in Homer: Dante prefigures for us the passion and colour and intensity of Italian painting: the modern love of landscape dates from Rousseau, and it is in Keats that one discerns the beginning of the artistic renaissance of England. Byron was a rebel and Shelley a dreamer; but in the calmness and clearness of his vision, his perfect self-control, his unerring sense of beauty and his recognition of a separate realm for the imagination, Keats was the pure and serene artist, the forerunner of the pre-Raphaelite school, and so of the great romantic movement of which I am to speak. — Oscar Wilde

O sir, you are old; nature in you stands on the very verge of her confine; you should be ruled and led by some discretion, that discerns your fate better than you yourself. — William Shakespeare

Withdraw now from the invisible pounding and weaving of your ingrained ideas. If you want to be rid of this invisible turmoil, you must just sit through it and let go of everything. Attain fulfillment and illuminate thoroughly. Light and shadow altogether forgotten. Drop off your own skin, and the sense-dusts will be fully purified. The eye then readily discerns the brightness. — Hongzhi Zhengjue

We have more poets than judges and interpreters of poetry. It is easier to write an indifferent poem than to understand a good one. There is, indeed, a certain low and moderate sort of poetry, that a man may well enough judge by certain rules of art; but the true, supreme, and divine poesy is equally above all rules and reason. And whoever discerns the beauty of it with the most assured and most steady sight sees no more than the quick reflection of a flash of lightning. — Michel De Montaigne

He who best discerns the worth of time is most distressed whenever time is lost. — Dante Alighieri

There are certain queer times and occasions in this strange mixed affair we call life when a man takes this whole universe for a vast practical joke, though the wit thereof he but dimly discerns, and more than suspects that the joke is at nobody's expense but his own. — Herman Melville

The good, supreme, divine poetry is above the rules and reason. Whoever discerns its beauty with a firm, sedate gaze does not see it, any more than he sees the splendor of a lightning flash. It does not persuade our judgement, it ravishes and overwhelms it. — Michel De Montaigne

For many men value appearances more than reality - thus they violate what's right. Everyone's prepared to sigh over some suffering man, though no sorrow really eats their hearts, or they can pretend to join another person's happiness forcing their faces into smiling masks. But a good man discerns true character - he's not fooled by eyes feigning loyalty, favouring him with watered-down respect. — Aeschylus

The New Testament never uses the expression 'help' of the grace of God in the soul. We have absolutely no power - God is not to help us, because we are weak: no, He is to give His life and His power in us as entirely impotent. He that discerns this aright will learn to live by faith alone. — Andrew Murray

The intellect is a cleaver; it discerns and rifts its way into the secrets of things. — Henry David Thoreau

There is no reason to suppose that taste is in any way a lower sense than the other four; a fine palate is as much a gift as an eye that discerns beauty or an ear that appreciates and enjoys subtle harmonies of sound, and we are quite right to value the pleasures that all our senses give us and educate their perceptions. — E.F. Benson

Criticism is not religion, and by no process can it be substituted for it. It is not the critic's eye, but the child's heart, that most truly discerns the countenance that looks out from the pages of the gospel. — John Campbell Shairp

I think I may define taste to be that faculty of the soul which discerns the beauties of an author with pleasure, and the imperfections with dislike. — Joseph Addison