C.N. Douglas, comp. Forty Thousand Quotations: Prose and Poetical. 1917.
Discernment
Lynx-eyed toward our equals, and moles to ourselves.
Good men can more easily see through bad men than the latter can the former.
The rarest things in world, next to a spirit of discernment, are diamonds and pearls.
There seems to be no part of knowledge in fewer hands than that of discerning when to have done.
Discernment is a power of the understanding in which few excel. Is not that owing to its connection with impartiality and truth? for are not prejudice and partiality blind?
If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him.
To succeed in the world, it is much more necessary to possess the penetration to discern who is a fool than to discover who is a clever man.
The idiot, the Indian, the child, and unschooled farmer’s boy stand nearer to the light by which nature is to be read, than the dissector or the antiquary.
Simple creatures, whose thoughts are not taken up, like those of educated people, with the care of a great museum of dead phrases, are very quick to see the live facts which are going on about them.