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More "Discerning" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... "You're a most discerning chap, Jack Rayburn," said his brother-in-law, heartily, "but there are other people with discernment. I have liked young Churchill from the moment I saw him first. All that Forester says of him ...
— The Second Violin • Grace S. Richmond
... her clear discerning eye The visionary shadows fly Of Folly's painted show. She sees thro' ev'ry fair disguise, That all but Virtue's solid joys, ...
— Clarissa, Volume 2 (of 9) • Samuel Richardson
... to-day, Clara and I, like old friends. Her intelligence is not large, but clear and discerning between bad and good, ugly and what she considers beautiful; consequently her judgment is not shifty, but calm and serene. She has that kind of spiritual healthiness often met with in Germans. Coming across them now and then I observe that the ...
— Without Dogma • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... Mr. Bryce's noble and discerning book deserves to hold its preeminent place for at least twenty years more."—Record-Herald, ...
— The Governments of Europe • Frederic Austin Ogg
... William and the mother of Ralph Waldo Emerson, is spoken of by the late Dr. Frothingham, in an article in the "Christian Examiner," as a woman "of great patience and fortitude, of the serenest trust in God, of a discerning spirit, and a most courteous bearing, one who knew how to guide the affairs of her own house, as long as she was responsible for that, with the sweetest authority, and knew how to give the least trouble and the greatest happiness after that authority was resigned. Both her mind and ...
— Ralph Waldo Emerson • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... folly, though it deceive itself with false names, cannot alter the true merits of things, and, mindful of the precept of Socrates, I do not think it right either to keep the truth concealed or allow falsehood to pass. But this, however it may be, I leave to thy judgment and to the verdict of the discerning. Moreover, lest the course of events and the true facts should be hidden from posterity, I have myself committed to writing an ...
— The Consolation of Philosophy • Boethius
... intended by nature for a public speaker. This worked without a hitch until the votresses began to tell each other what the great speaker had said, when it naturally followed that Mrs Dash, though she thought that Mrs Speaker had been discerning to discover this latent oratorical talent in herself, immediately had the effervescence taken out of her self-complacence on finding that that stupid Mrs Blank had been assured ...
— Some Everyday Folk and Dawn • Miles Franklin
... of a San Francisco citizen as a lamb, who, unless bought as a playmate for the children, would inevitably pass into the butcher's hands. A combination of refined sensibility and urban ignorance of nature prevented them from discerning certain glaring facts that betrayed his caprid origin. So a ribbon was duly tied round his neck, and in pleasing emulation of the legendary "Mary," he was taken to school by the confiding children. Here, alas the fraud ...
— Mr. Jack Hamlin's Mediation and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... MAURIER, the well-known artist in black and white, has generously assisted Mr. GEORGE DU MAURIER, the rising novelist, by profusely illustrating the work. 'Tis a pretty rivalry; hard to say which has the better of it. Wherein a discerning Public, long familiar with DU MAURIER's sketches, will recognise a note of highest praise for ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Volume 102, Jan. 2, 1892 • Various
... was very poor. She did not need to be informed that he was helpless. Her instinct had told her that long ago. She was only nineteen, but she looked at men and women with those discerning grey eyes, in which there seemed to lurk a quiet light like the light of stars, and saw right through them. She was woman enough—despite the apparent inconsequence of the schoolroom, which still lent a vagueness to her thoughts ...
— The Last Hope • Henry Seton Merriman
... make the Ministery of this Land sworn Enemies to the intended Reformation: So that we walked in a very wildernesse, in a labyrinth, and as upon deep waters, wherein not onely did our feet lose footing, but also our eyes all discovering or discerning of any ground; yea; wee were ready to lose our selves: Yet the Lord hath graciously rid us, and recovered us out of all these difficulties, and set our feet upon a rock, and ordered our goings. The experience wee ...
— The Acts Of The General Assemblies of the Church of Scotland
... the enlightened man will then be the task of a healthy person who has made himself acquainted with the laws of evolution in art and in society, and is able to test the excellence of work in any stage from immaturity to decadence by discerning what there is of truth, sincerity, and ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... "Juvenilia" attached to the first series of these poems is of his own choosing. It is for the reader to judge what allowance is to be made for unripeness, whether of substance or of form. Criticism is none of my present business. But I think no discerning reader can fail to be impressed by one great virtue pervading all the poet's work—its absolute sincerity. There is no pose, no affectation of any sort. There are marks of the loving study of other poets, and these the best. We are frequently reminded of this singer and ...
— Poems • Alan Seeger
... together. It not unfrequently happened that the report of a gun fired at a kangaroo near the beach brought out two or three bellowing seals from under bushes considerably further from the water-side. The seal, indeed, seemed to be much the most discerning animal of the two; for its actions bespoke a knowledge of our not being kangaroos, whereas the kangaroo not unfrequently appeared to ...
— A Voyage to Terra Australis • Matthew Flinders
... The candle which I looked at seemed as if it were encircled by a rainbow. Not long after the sight of the left part of the left eye (which I lost some years before the other) became quite obscured, and prevented me from discerning any object on that side. The sight in my other eye has now been gradually and sensibly vanishing away for about three years; some months before it had entirely perished, though I stood motionless, every thing which I looked at seemed in ...
— International Weekly Miscellany Of Literature, Art, and Science - Vol. I., July 22, 1850. No. 4. • Various
... just before entering Boldwood's house; but before he had weighed that information, this fatal event had been superimposed. However, it was too late now to think of sending another messenger, and he rode on, in the excitement of these self-inquiries not discerning, when about three miles from Casterbridge, a square-figured pedestrian passing along under the dark hedge in the same direction ...
— Far from the Madding Crowd • Thomas Hardy
... which Christ spoke out of the exceeding bitterness of His sorrow in the following way—namely, that His spirit and inward man, taking upon itself the severe judgment of God upon all sinners, and at the same time discerning clearly and feeling and measuring in Himself the intolerable weight of His Passion, on this account cried out in a sorrowful voice to His Father, and complained tenderly to Him because He had been cast into these dreadful torments; as if the ...
— Light, Life, and Love • W. R. Inge
... himself and others by means of reasonable adornments I like and even respect warmly. The philosophers may growl as they chose, but I contend that the sight of a superb young Englishman with his clean clear face, his springy limbs, his faultless habiliments is about as pleasant as anything can be to a discerning man. Moreover, it is by no means true that the dandy is necessarily incompetent when he comes to engage in the severe work of life. Our hero, our Nelson, kept his nautical dandyism until he was middle-aged. ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman
... for which the country had such boundless occasion for gratitude. Another gentleman, in the uniform of the Guards, seconded the Address, and declared that in nothing was the sagacity of a Legislature so necessary as in discerning the period in which that which had hitherto been good ceased to be serviceable. The status pupillaris was mentioned, and it was understood that he had implied that England was now old enough to go on in matters of religion without a tutor in the ...
— Phineas Redux • Anthony Trollope
... the basis of union, the Westminster standards; but the abstract of principles, which they adopted as the more immediate bond of coalescence, discovered, to discerning spectators, that the individuals forming the combination, were by no means unanimous in their views of the doctrines taught in those standards. Indeed, there were certain sections of the Confession reserved for future discussion, which, in process of time, ...
— Act, Declaration, & Testimony for the Whole of our Covenanted Reformation, as Attained to, and Established in Britain and Ireland; Particularly Betwixt the Years 1638 and 1649, Inclusive • The Reformed Presbytery
... less, either in relation to different times, or in different men. Because one man is better disposed than another to attain to the mean of virtue which is defined by right reason; and this, on account of either greater habituation, or a better natural disposition, or a more discerning judgment of reason, or again a greater gift of grace, which is given to each one "according to the measure of the giving of Christ," as stated in Eph. 4:9. And here the Stoics erred, for they held that no man should be deemed virtuous, unless ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I-II (Pars Prima Secundae) - From the Complete American Edition • Saint Thomas Aquinas
... from seeing any relation of cause and effect between the coaches, palaces, and bowls of punch, and the "knot of deputy sheriffs," as a Fenian is from discerning any connection between the Irish rackrenting of the last century, and the Irish beggary of this. Like conditions produce like characters. How interesting to discover in this republican, this native Virginian of English stock, a perfect and splendid ...
— Famous Americans of Recent Times • James Parton
... impression of a man on foot laden with gold passing through some evil-haunted wood, in the dark and unarmed. And he reflected that it would be well for the protege to watch, without seeming to do so, over the protector, to become the discerning Telemachus of the blind Mentor, to point out to him the quagmires, to defend him against the highwaymen, to aid him, in a word, in his combats amid all that swarm of nocturnal ambuscades which he felt were prowling ferociously around the Nabob and ...
— The Nabob • Alphonse Daudet
... "Betrayed by my accomplices, I found myself, as it were, a shred of flotsam adrift in the darkling streets. Several people thought I was the Marble Arch, and left me on the left. Others, more discerning, conjured me to pull in to the kerb. Removing from my north instep the hoof which, upon examination, I found to be attached to a large mammal, I started to wade south-west and by south, hoping against hope and steering ...
— Berry And Co. • Dornford Yates
... the Ego[42], and the interior Self is well known to exist on account of its immediate (intuitive) presentation.[43] Nor is it an exceptionless rule that objects can be superimposed only on such other objects as are before us, i.e. in contact with our sense-organs; for non-discerning men superimpose on the ether, which is not the object ...
— The Vedanta-Sutras with the Commentary by Sankaracarya - Sacred Books of the East, Volume 1 • George Thibaut
... brave and suffering soldiers. Women, equally with men, should address themselves to the removing of the wicked cause of all this terrible sacrifice of life and its loving, peaceful issues. It is their privilege to profit by the lessons being taught at such a fearful cost. And discerning clearly the mistakes of the past, it is their duty to apply themselves cheerfully and perseveringly to the eradication of every wrong and the restoration of every right, as affecting directly or indirectly the progress of the race toward the divine standard of human intelligence and goodness. ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... performed in the Theatre de Monsieur, in the palace of the Tuileries, which is now converted into a hall for the sittings of the Council of State. The success of this company had a rapid influence on the taste of the discerning part of the French public. This was the less extraordinary as, perhaps, no Italian sovereign had ever assembled one composed of so many capital performers. In Italy, there are seldom more than two of that degree of merit in a company; the rest are not attended to, because they ...
— Paris As It Was and As It Is • Francis W. Blagdon
... cultivating, and harvesting of their crops, the pupils should undertake some work in seed selection. This work not only results in the improvement of the plants grown from year to year, but also helps to train the pupils in painstaking observation and the discerning of minute points of excellence. The ambition to produce, by careful selection and thorough cultivation, a grain or flower better than has been, is aroused, and, as the pupil's interest increases, his love for the art increases and his efforts ...
— Ontario Teachers' Manuals: Nature Study • Ontario Ministry of Education
... Responsibility, apprehension, and strained effort had printed their marks on her features. But the majority of acquaintances were more impressed by her good intention than by her capacity; they would call her 'a nice thing.' The discerning minority, while saying with admiring conviction that she was 'a very fine girl,' would regret that somehow she had not the faculty of 'making the best of herself,' of 'putting her best foot foremost.' And would they not heartily stand up for her ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... be reached by the learned and discerning, the devotion of the common people showed no signs of flagging. In the parish church of St. Stephen at Noyon, it was not the Christian proto-martyr alone that was decorated with a cap and other gewgaws, ...
— The Rise of the Hugenots, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Henry Martyn Baird
... as first ye come all to get auguries of birds, even such is in all things your carriage, Be the matter a matter of trade, or of earning your bread, or of any one's marriage. And all things ye lay to the charge of a bird that belong to discerning prediction: Winged fame is a bird, as you reckon: you sneeze, and the sign's as a bird for conviction: All tokens are 'birds' with you—sounds too, and lackeys, and donkeys. Then must it not follow That we ARE to you all as the manifest godhead ...
— Studies in Song • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... uncanny faculty of discerning latent talent in the line of his profession. You may not know one dance step from another, yet his discerning eye will detect a possibility for you in some branch of the dancing art that results will later prove as correct as they are surprising ...
— The Art of Stage Dancing - The Story of a Beautiful and Profitable Profession • Ned Wayburn
... weighty place. Charles, to late times to be transmitted fair, Assigned his figure to Bernini's care; And great Nassau to Kneller's hand decreed To fix him graceful on the bounding steed; So well in paint and stone they judged of merit: But kings in wit may want discerning spirit. The hero William and the martyr Charles, One knighted Blackmore, and one pensioned Quarles; Which made old Ben, and surly Dennis swear, "No Lord's anointed, but a Russian bear." Not with such majesty, such bold relief, The forms august, of king, or conquering chief, E'er swelled on ...
— Essay on Man - Moral Essays and Satires • Alexander Pope
... over Jenks' Smithsonian difficulty, which a prudent lawyer and discerning jury brought out ...
— The Humors of Falconbridge - A Collection of Humorous and Every Day Scenes • Jonathan F. Kelley
... supposing ourselves ever so incapable of defining law, or discerning its interruption, we need not therefore lose our conception of the one, nor our faith in the other. Some of us may no more be able to know a genuine miracle, when we see it, than others to know a genuine picture; but the ordinary impulse to regard, therefore, ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... there are "nombreux des Anglais a St. Servan, des jeunes gens vivant dans les pensions brittaniques—des familles venant l'ete faire en Bretagne une cure d'economies pour l'hiver." Continuing, this discerning author says: "Bathers, bicyclists, golfists, promenaders, and excursionists abound." Better then let them hold forth here to their hearts' content; there is little that the lover of churches will gain from what remains to-day of the town's ...
— The Cathedrals of Northern France • Francis Miltoun
... evening for coming abroad. A blusterous wind had risen during the day, and still continued to increase. Yet he stood watchful in the darkness, and was ultimately rewarded by discerning a shady muffled shape that embodied itself from the field, accompanied by the scratching of silk over stubble. There was no longer any disguise as to the nature of their meeting. It was a lover's assignation, pure and simple; and boldly realizing ...
— Two on a Tower • Thomas Hardy
... felt a special interest in the attitude of his native state, Kentucky. That attitude would have perplexed and embarrassed a less discerning statesman. Taking her stand on the dogma of State Sovereignty Kentucky declared herself "neutral" in the impending war between the United and Confederate States, and forbade the troops of either party to cross her territory. Lincoln could not, of course, recognize ...
— A History of the United States • Cecil Chesterton
... incurred, I have resolved that these four volumes shall be the heralds or avant-couriers of the Tales which are yet in my possession, nothing doubting that they will be eagerly devoured, and the remainder anxiously demanded, by the unanimous voice of a discerning public. I rest, esteemed Reader, thine ...
— Old Mortality, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... desire of both hearts should be compassed, and he, too, admitted to the precious privileges of education; courageously pleading the cause of both brothers in the morning; prevailing by the wise and discerning affection of the mother; suspending his studies of the law, and registering deeds and teaching school to earn the means, for both, of availing themselves of the opportunity which the parental self-sacrifice had placed within their reach; loving him through life, mourning him when dead, with a love ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... of work in the nature of secret service, Captain Prescott," he continued, "and it demands a wary eye and a discerning mind." ...
— Before the Dawn - A Story of the Fall of Richmond • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
... step by step by invisible bonds held by hands unseen. So with white face and shaking form he reached the barrier, and knelt as Esmo rose from his place, honouring instinctively, though his eyes seemed incapable of discerning them, the symbols of supreme authority. Then, at a silent gesture, he rose and fell back into the chair placed for him, apparently unable to stand and scarcely able to ...
— Across the Zodiac • Percy Greg
... forming one primary element of a powerful mind, Dr. Chalmers used to say, when a man of activity and public mark was mentioned, "Has he wecht? he has promptitude—has he power? he has power—has he promptitude? and, moreover, has he a discerning spirit?" ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown
... creatures, hath mingled it sparingly with any vain or feigned matter; and yet on the other side hath cast all prodigious narrations, which he thought worthy the recording, into one book, excellently discerning that matter of manifest truth, such whereupon observation and rule was to be built, was not to be mingled or weakened with matter of doubtful credit; and yet again, that rarities and reports that ...
— The Advancement of Learning • Francis Bacon
... forehead, irregular nose, rather prominent jaw-bones, lips just a little sensual, but speaking good-humour and intellectual character. A heavy moustache; no beard. Eyes dark, keen, very capable of tenderness, but perhaps more often shrewdly discerning or cynically speculative. One felt that the present expression of genial friendliness was unfamiliar to the face, though it by no means failed in pleasantness. The lips had the look of being frequently gnawed in intense thought or strong feeling. In the cheeks no healthy colour, ...
— The Unclassed • George Gissing
... quickened his sense of his own unworthiness. After a disagreeable evening, the first of that kind that he had ever passed with his Amelia, in which he had the utmost difficulty to force a little chearfulness, and in which her spirits were at length overpowered by discerning the oppression on his, they retired to rest, or rather to misery, which ...
— Amelia (Complete) • Henry Fielding
... Would not detain them as they fly, those hours of toil and danger; For O we stand on Jordan's strand, our friends are passing over, And just before, the shining shore we may almost discover. We'll gird our loins my brethren dear, our distant home discerning, Our absent Lord has left us word, let every lamp be burning, For O we stand on Jordan's strand, our friends are passing over, And just before, the shining ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... present case it would be too easy to prove that melancholy fact.[46] I therefore applauded my right honorable friend, who, when he canvassed the Company's accounts, as a preliminary to a bill that ought not to stand on falsehood of any kind, fixed his discerning eye and his deciding hand on these debts of the Company from the Nabob of Arcot and Rajah of Tanjore, and at one stroke expunged them all, as utterly irrecoverable: he might have added, ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. III. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... published his first little volume of poems in 1817. He knew no Greek; yet Greek literature absorbed and fascinated him, as he saw its broken and imperfect reflection in an English translation. Like Shakespeare, who also was but poorly educated in the schools, he had a marvelous faculty of discerning the real spirit of the classics,—a faculty denied to many great scholars, and to most of the "classic" writers of the preceding century,—and so he set himself to the task of reflecting in modern English the spirit of the ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... manifold forms of worship of the various nations, and discerning that through them all the soul of man was feeling after one and the same Divine Being, ...
— The Right and Wrong Uses of the Bible • R. Heber Newton
... meet your Lordship's approbation, and that of a discerning Public; or if they tend in the most remote degree to excite more intelligent efforts and more active enterprise on behalf of the unenlightened African, or to augment the Commerce of the United Kingdom with a Country, now in danger of falling into the hands of our ...
— Observations Upon The Windward Coast Of Africa • Joseph Corry
... tell Where I knew under heavens the noblest of queens, Golden-adorned, giving forth treasures. Then in company with Scilling, in clear ringing voice 'Fore our beloved lord I uplifted my song; 105 Loudly the harp in harmony sounded; Then many men with minds discerning Spoke of our lay in unsparing praise, That they never had heard a nobler song. Then I roamed through all the realm of the Goths; 110 Unceasing I sought the surest of friends, The crowd of comrades of the court of Eormanric. Hethca sought I and Beadeca and the Harlungs, Emerca sought ...
— Old English Poems - Translated into the Original Meter Together with Short Selections from Old English Prose • Various
... of her machine. Her face had paled, and her heart was thumping in great pulsations. Iredale went on. He had assumed his characteristic composure. What fire burned beneath his calm exterior, it would have needed the discerning eyes of Sarah Gurridge to detect, for, beyond the occasional flashing of his quiet grey eyes, there was little ...
— The Hound From The North • Ridgwell Cullum
... said nothing, but was heard in self-communing to deplore the barbarity of war. All night he seemed restless, fearing lest the Russians should elude him as they had in other crises; but, rising at five, and discerning their lines, he called aloud: "They are ours at last! March on; let us open ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. III. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... that she was under age, had refused to deal with him. When I began to question the snake, it hissed, "Mind your own business." I replied that this was my business, and asked the detectives to investigate. Discerning quickly what it was that we had discovered, they promptly locked the thing in an iron cage, like any other wild beast. The girl was cared for. Her anxiety was expressed in her words, "What will my ...
— Fighting the Traffic in Young Girls - War on the White Slave Trade • Various
... respects by nature, and highly cultivated by study, a mind which has exercised considerable influence on the most enlightened generation of the most enlightened people that ever existed, should be utterly destitute of the power of discerning truth from falsehood. Yet such is the fact. Government is to Mr. Southey one of the fine arts. He judges of a theory, of a public measure, of a religion or a political party, of a peace or a war, as men judge of a picture ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... seedling tree of two or three years, the butternut is indistinguishable from the black walnut except to a very discerning and practiced eye, especially in the autumn after its leaves have fallen. As the trees grow older, the difference in their bark becomes more apparent, that of the butternut remaining smooth for many years, as contrasted to the bark on black walnut trees which begins to ...
— Growing Nuts in the North • Carl Weschcke
... has done what even the most prodigious powers of invention could not do. And lastly, he must believe that these same illiterate men, who were capable of so much, were also capable of projecting a system of doctrine singularly remote from all ordinary and previous speculation; of discerning the necessity of taking under their special patronage those passive virtues which man least loved, and found it must difficult to cultivate; and of exhibiting, in their preference of the spiritual to the ceremonial, and their treatment of many of the most delicate questions of practical ...
— Reason and Faith; Their Claims and Conflicts • Henry Rogers
... "Janet's Repentance" that the power of the author is put most strongly forth, and also that what we conceive to be the vital aim of her works is most definitely and firmly pronounced. Here also we have illustrated that breadth of nature, that power of discerning the true and good under whatsoever external form it may wear, which is almost a necessary adjunct of the author's true and large ideal of the Christian life. She goes, it might almost seem, out of her way to ...
— The Ethics of George Eliot's Works • John Crombie Brown
... eating rapidly developed. Later not only the food in the dish, but most unhappily the foods he had swallowed were scrutinized by every alertness of sensation and imagination, and most damagingly did he become a victim of the unwholesome symptom-studying habit. Within two months his discerning physician recognized that the self-interest which had started in the physical damage of rapid eating of rich foods was developing into an obsession more detrimental than the original physical disorder, and thought it wise for him to discontinue study ...
— Our Nervous Friends - Illustrating the Mastery of Nervousness • Robert S. Carroll
... to be said in this connection that workmen are already discerning the practical and real causes at work affecting their wages—affecting them more directly than any tariff system possibly could—by showing no small alarm at the immigration of foreigners, such as the Hungarian miners and Italian laborers, who willingly underbid them. In other ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • John Stuart Mill
... brass, by long attrition tried, Placed by the purer metal's side, Displays at length a dingy hue, That proves its former claim untrue; So time's discerning hand hath art To set the good ...
— The Two Guardians • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... every eye that perceives these blemishes. It must be an eye long used to the contemplation and comparison of these forms; and which, by a long habit of observing what any set of objects of the same kind have in common, that alone can acquire the power of discerning what each wants in particular. This long laborious comparison should be the first study of the painter who aims at the greatest style. By this means, he acquires a just idea of beautiful forms; he corrects nature by herself, her imperfect state by her ...
— Seven Discourses on Art • Joshua Reynolds
... paper. But I am speaking only of the habit of mind required for study; of that inductive habit of mind which works, steadily and by rule, from the known to the unknown; that habit of mind of which it has been said:—"The habit of seeing; the habit of knowing what we see; the habit of discerning differences and likenesses; the habit of classifying accordingly; the habit of searching for hypotheses which shall connect and explain those classified facts; the habit of verifying these hypotheses by applying them to fresh facts; the habit of throwing them away bravely if ...
— Health and Education • Charles Kingsley
... a distinction, knowledge of which is essential to discerning true strength. It can be clearly seen in the contrast between two certain fighting forces; first, a well-organised army, capably led, marching forward full of hope and buoyancy; second, a remnant of that army after disaster, a mere handful, not swept like their comrades in panic, but with ...
— Principles of Freedom • Terence J. MacSwiney
... place under the new superintendent; but he seemed the only one unable to realize that Bucks, patient and long-suffering, had put McCloud into the mountain saddle expressly to deal with cases such as his. In the West sympathy is quick but not always discerning. Medicine Bend took Sinclair's grievance as its own. No other man in the service had Sinclair's following, and within a week petitions were being circulated through the town not asking merely but calling for his ...
— Whispering Smith • Frank H. Spearman
... approached within a yard, stopped; twisted his mustache, resting his left hand on his hip. His discerning inspection was soon completed. He was fully aware of the desperate and reckless light ...
— The Grey Cloak • Harold MacGrath
... of those times but what are left by the Romans, and these we ought to read with caution, because they were parties in the dispute. If two antagonists write each his own history, the discerning reader will sometimes draw the line of justice between them; but where there is only one, partiality is expected. The Romans were obliged to make the Britons war-like, or there would have been no merit in conquering ...
— An History of Birmingham (1783) • William Hutton
... ruins they had no clue to guide their footsteps, in which the peoples of the world were told to follow. Only true political vision, breadth of judgment, thorough mastery of the elements of the situation, an instinct for discerning central issues, genuine concern for high principles of governance, and the rare moral courage that disregards popularity as a mainspring of action—could have fitted any set of legislators to tackle the complex and thorny problems that pressed for settlement and to effect the necessary preliminary ...
— The Inside Story Of The Peace Conference • Emile Joseph Dillon
... What would it do with sight in the murky thickness of a tree-trunk? Hearing is likewise absent. In the never-troubled silence of the oak's inmost heart, the sense of hearing would be a non-sense. Where sounds are lacking, of what use is the faculty of discerning them? Should there be any doubts, I will reply to them with the following experiment. Split lengthwise, the grub's abode leaves a half-tunnel wherein I can watch the occupant's doings. When left alone, it now gnaws the front of its gallery, now rests, fixed by its ...
— The Wonders of Instinct • J. H. Fabre
... progress into my master's—I mean the learned Doctor Doboobie's—mystery than he was willing to own; and indeed half of his quarrel and malice against me was that, besides that I got something too deep into his secrets, several discerning persons, and particularly a buxom young widow of Abingdon, preferred ...
— Kenilworth • Sir Walter Scott
... the two latter meanings, we shall have an assertion that "Mercy is not weakened by too much violence (or put to its utmost strength), but droppeth, as the gentle rain from heaven," &c., where it would require a most discerning editor to explain the connexion between the two clauses. If, on the other hand, we take the first two meanings, the passage is capable of being understood, if nothing else. Beginning with to squeeze through something; what would present itself to our ideas would be, that "Mercy ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 71, March 8, 1851 • Various
... gird our loins, my brethren dear, Our heavenly home discerning; Our absent Lord has left us word, "Let every ...
— Memories of Childhood's Slavery Days • Annie L. Burton
... itself. But the believer who receives the sacrament with consciousness of sin, by receiving it unworthily despises the sacrament, not in itself, but in its use. Hence the Apostle (1 Cor. 11:29) in assigning the cause of this sin, says, "not discerning the body of the Lord," that is, not distinguishing it from other food: and this is what he does who disbelieves Christ's presence ...
— Summa Theologica, Part III (Tertia Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas
... discerning the shallow inconsistency between the ideal so long preached of motherhood as woman's chief if not her only contribution to normal life and genuine social usefulness and the abnormal economic conditions and double ethical standards which doom so many women to single life. Still deeper ...
— The Family and it's Members • Anna Garlin Spencer
... impulse which directs his attention to external things, he has acquired other relations with the world, other forms of interest; these are no longer merely those primitive ones which are bound up with a species of primordial instinct, but have become a discerning interest, based upon the conquests of ...
— Spontaneous Activity in Education • Maria Montessori
... conceivable difference of manners and opinions have implanted in the Canadian mind a more ancient and rooted national antipathy than that which they feel against the people of the United States. Their more discerning leaders feel that their chances of preserving their nationality would be greatly diminished by an incorporation with the United States; and recent symptoms of Anti-Catholic feeling in New England, well known to the Canadian population, ...
— Diary in America, Series Two • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... Boston, skilfully and daringly handled. There is plenty of life and color abounding, and a diversity of characters—shop-girls, society belles, men about town, city politicians, and others. The various schemers and their schemes will be followed with interest—and there will be some discerning readers who may claim to recognize in certain points of the story certain recent happenings in the shopping and the society ...
— The Bright Face of Danger • Robert Neilson Stephens
... which bare with them, and seemed by striking her sailes, as though she would also haue ancred: but taking her fittest occasion hoised againe, and would haue passed vp the riuer, but the Generall presently discerning her purpose, sent out a pinnesse or two after her, which forced her in such sort, as she ran herselfe upon the Rocks: all the men escaped out of her, and the lading (being many chests of sugar) was made ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, and Discoveries of The English Nation, v. 7 - England's Naval Exploits Against Spain • Richard Hakluyt
... that seizes instinctively on those variations of form that are expressive of this inner man. The habitual cast of thought in any individual affects the shape and moulds the form of the features, and, to the discerning, the head is expressive of the person; both the bigger and the smaller person, both the larger and the petty characteristics everybody possesses. And the fine portrait will express the larger and subordinate the ...
— The Practice and Science Of Drawing • Harold Speed
... you have been turned from that manifold idolatry to the one true worship and have been enlightened by God's Word. More than that, in Christ have been bestowed upon you great and glorious gifts—discerning of the Scriptures, diversities of tongues, power to work miracles—things impossible to the world. It is unmistakably evident that you embrace the true God, who does not, like dumb idols, leave you to wander in the error of your own speculations, ...
— Epistle Sermons, Vol. III - Trinity Sunday to Advent • Martin Luther
... oblieg'd the age, thy wel known worth Is to our joy auspiciously brought forth. Good morrow to thy son, thy first borne flame Which, as thou gav'st it birth, stamps it a name, That Fate and a discerning age shall set The chiefest jewell in ...
— Lucasta • Richard Lovelace
... will closely observe the working of that mainspring of human actions—selfishness—on the society, whether in a village, a city, a country, or a metropolis in which he resides, will have no difficulty in discerning the real but secret, and therefore unobserved spring of the greatest changes that ever occur in the political and social world. Voltaire said the factions at Geneva were storms in a teacup; if any man will study the motion of water in a teacup, he will be at ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 360, October 1845 • Various
... life for points in etiquette and manner once familiar, but now almost forgotten by him and by the world. His quaint old resurrections were comical and apt to create mirth, but beneath their oddities I believe a discerning person would easily ...
— A Forest Hearth: A Romance of Indiana in the Thirties • Charles Major
... towered I to a dainty world: the air Was sweet and calm, and in my memory Waked my serener mother's looks: this fair Canaan now fled from my discerning eye; The earth was shrunk so small, methought I read, By that due ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... campaigns, both modern and ancient; but those who anticipated confidently that the Boer War would soon be brought to a successful close by the British Army were led into their error by the history of past campaigns. There was, however, one campaign, the War of Independence in North America, which the discerning might have recognized as an analogous struggle; but it was overlooked, and the history of the great European conflicts was established as the leading authority. The occupation of the populous places and the control of the means of access to them, which seemed to present few difficulties, meant ...
— A Handbook of the Boer War • Gale and Polden, Limited
... not now concern us. For our purpose, the main thing to learn is not the art of accumulating material, but the sublimer art of investigating it, of discerning truth from falsehood and certainty from doubt. It is by solidity of criticism more than by the plenitude of erudition, that the study of history strengthens, and straightens, and extends the mind 60. And the accession of the critic in the place of the indefatigable ...
— Lectures on Modern history • Baron John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton
... destiny, but more than all else just now he was thinking of the woman before him and the issue to be faced by him regarding her. His thoughts were not so clear nor so discerning as Detricand's. No more than he understood Guida did he understand this clear-eyed, still, self-possessed woman. He thought her cold, unsympathetic, barren of that glow which should set the pulses of a man like himself bounding. ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... presence. It is sheer slander, that you have caught up from some malignant British review, and, like all other serpents, you are venomous in proportion to your blindness! I am vexed with you, that you will not see with the clear, discerning eyes ...
— Miriam Monfort - A Novel • Catherine A. Warfield
... might well express astonishment at the rash and groundless statement in "Blackwood" (Dec. 1839), that the third part of Christabel which Dr. Maginn sent to that magazine in 1820 "perplexed the public, and pleased even Coleridge." How far the "discerning public" were imposed upon I know not; the following extract will show how far the poet-philosopher was ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 237, May 13, 1854 • Various
... That donkey was a discerning animal. I think it knew when it first set eyes on us that we were not going to overwork it; and we didn't. When, toward evening, we quit work, after narrowly escaping being killed by a large stone that fell from the roof in consequence of our neglect to brace it up properly, our united efforts ...
— Stories of Achievement, Volume IV (of 6) - Authors and Journalists • Various
... and that the truth lies in the word of God. Dear friends! let me beseech you to take heed lest, while you are only conscious of your hearts expanding with the genial glow of liberality, by little and little you lose your power of discerning between things that differ, your sense of the worth of the Scripture as the depository of divine truth, and from your slack hand the hem of the vesture in which ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... matron thought herself, she saw but one side of the question: blind and dull of comprehension as she thought Lady Clonbrony on this subject, she was herself so completely blinded by her own prejudices, as to be incapable of discerning the plain thing that was before her eyes; VIDELICET, that Lord Colambre preferred Grace Nugent. Lord Colambre made no proposal before the end of the week, but this Mrs. Broadhurst attributed to an unexpected ...
— The Absentee • Maria Edgeworth
... McClernand of Illinois, and John Pettit of Indiana, all the Democratic representatives from the four North-western States (Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and Michigan) voted for the anti-slavery proviso offered by Mr. Wilmot. Mr. Douglas, discerning the future more clearly than his party associates, realized that the chief strength of the Democracy must continue to lie in the South, and that an anti-slavery attitude on the part of the North-western Democrats would ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Volume 2 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... lowered the whole tone of public life.[68] But he kept in touch with the middle classes, was honest personally, and had a large amount of tact and good sense. His power in the House of Commons endured because he understood the management of parliamentary affairs, and had a genius for discerning the men whose support he could buy, ...
— The Rise of the Democracy • Joseph Clayton
... and his guard marched proudly before him. The cat, with his hands tied together, stood weeping. Upon arriving at the execution grounds and discerning that the cat was not yet executed, the King said angrily to the hangman: "Why is it this prisoner is ...
— The Cat and the Mouse - A Book of Persian Fairy Tales • Hartwell James
... Mallet du Pan, a liberal, independent, and discerning observer, whom, apart from the gift of style, Taine compares to Burke, and who, like Burke, went over ...
— Lectures on the French Revolution • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... impertinent attentions the secret of which belongs to the French savages who dwell in the depths of the provinces, and whose manners are very little known, despite the efforts of the realists in fiction. It was, it is said, this shocking situation,—one perfectly appreciated by a discerning jury,—which won the prisoner a verdict softened ...
— Petty Troubles of Married Life, Second Part • Honore de Balzac
... most part, in the solemnities and paraphernalia of civilised Life, which we make so much of, nothing but so many Cloth-rags, turkey-poles, and 'bladders with dried peas.' To linger among such speculations, longer than mere Science requires, a discerning public can have no wish. For our purposes the simple fact that such a Naked World is possible, nay actually exists (under the Clothed one), will be sufficient. Much, therefore, we omit about 'Kings wrestling naked on the green with Carmen,' ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... the task of ordering his thought would need to possess, in addition to the highest musical and dramatic qualifications a metaphysical habit of mind such as is rare at the present day, and a sympathetic capacity for discerning the grains of golden truth amidst the dross. He must construct anew. Wagner's theoretical edifice will not stand as it is; it is too loosely jointed; but the materials are valuable. That there will ever be a real science of aesthetics I do not believe; art would cease to be art if it lost its ...
— Wagner's Tristan und Isolde • George Ainslie Hight
... there is (at p. 123.) a ballad upon a sign-post set up by one Mr. Pecke, at Skoale in Norfolk. It appears from this ballad, that the sign in question had figures of Bacchus, Diana, Justice, and Prudence, "a fellow that's small, with a quadrant discerning the wind," Temperance, Fortitude, Time, Charon and Cerberus. This sign is noticed in the Journal of Mr. E. Browne (Sir Thomas Browne's Works, ed. Wilkin, i. 53.). Under date of 4th March, 1663-64, he says:—"About three mile further I came to Scoale, where is very handsome inne, and the ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 16, February 16, 1850 • Various
... surfeited with beauty and then retire for a smoke or other innocent diversion without the haunting fear that possibly Dick or Bill was circling around and around in ever-deepening gloom with one's elected for the night. Nancy had permanently impressed herself upon the imagination of discerning Woodbridge youth, and it was hardly extravagant that Tom should look ...
— Tutors' Lane • Wilmarth Lewis
... with heedful eyes, The wants of his two universities: Troops he to Oxford sent, as knowing why That learned body wanted loyalty: But books to Cambridge gave, as well discerning That that right ...
— Anecdotes of the late Samuel Johnson, LL.D. - during the last twenty years of his life • Hester Lynch Piozzi
... Government dreaded. They had been stunned by the unexpected blow struck by the people in asserting the independence of the legislature: for whatever credit the Parliament of that day may assume for the part which they acted in that business, it requires no argument to prove to a discerning man, that they were passive instruments in the people's hand—they only re-echoed the voice of an armed nation which they conceived too loud to be smothered, and were hurried on irresistibly by that enthusiastic sentiment for national independence, ...
— The Causes of the Rebellion in Ireland Disclosed • Anonymous
... vagaries of the imagination rendered more difficult by want of the ordinary appeal to the evidence of the bodily senses. In other respects their blood beat temperately, they possessed the ordinary capacity of ascertaining the truth or discerning the falsehood of external appearances by an appeal to the organ of sight. Unfortunately, however, as is now universally known and admitted, there certainly exists more than one disorder known to professional men of which one important symptom is a ...
— Letters On Demonology And Witchcraft • Sir Walter Scott
... him. Wondering what miracle had saved him, he took a few steps forward. A couple of young clerks coming up from behind turned to look at him, but on encountering his answering stare of angry alarm, appeared confused and went their way. It began to dawn upon him that mankind was less discerning than he had feared. Gaining courage as he proceeded, he reached Holborn. Here the larger crowd swept around ...
— Tommy and Co. • Jerome K. Jerome
... little cares and vexations, which is slowly wearing on the finer springs of life, is seen by no one; scarce ever do they speak of these things to their nearest friends. Yet were there a friend of a spirit so discerning as to feel and sympathize in all these things, how much of this repressed electric restlessness would pass off ...
— The May Flower, and Miscellaneous Writings • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... our Captain did behold and view the most of all that fair city, discerning the large street which lieth directly from the sea into the ...
— Sir Francis Drake Revived • Philip Nichols
... young Macedonian of good family, to the corps of the Hetairoi; and how the vigorous old man's eyes sparkled as, with youthful enthusiasm, he spoke of the divine vanquisher of the world who had at that time condescended to address him, gazed at him keenly yet encouragingly with his all-discerning but kindly blue eyes, and extended his hand ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... examples submitted to him. To study one good master till you understand him will teach you more than a superficial acquaintance with a thousand: power of criticism does not consist in knowing the names or the manner of many painters, but in discerning the excellence of ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... was of persons, unless businesse with them, or his concerns pointed them out and adverted him; seeing and discerning were two things: often in several places, hath he met with Gentlemen of his nearest and greatest Acquaintance, at a full rencounter and stop, whom he hath endeavoured to passe by, not knowing, that is to say, not minding ...
— Characters from 17th Century Histories and Chronicles • Various
... The good child had one trait which she could not have inherited from her father; she was quick-witted and discerning; yet now she ...
— Old Creole Days • George Washington Cable
... author opportune and substantial service, at once came before the public with a generous estimate of the work in the North American Review; but the choice little volume, the most promising addition to American literature that had appeared for many years, made little impression on the public mind. Discerning readers, however, recognized the supreme beauty in this new writer, and they never afterwards lost sight ...
— Yesterdays with Authors • James T. Fields
... eminent men for that talent to be called in question; they seem to have decided talents and dispositions for financial operations. A Genevois has the aptitude of great application united to a very discerning, natural genius, and he generally succeeds in everything he undertakes. Literature is much cultivated here, and the females, who are in general handsome and graceful, excel not only in the various ...
— After Waterloo: Reminiscences of European Travel 1815-1819 • Major W. E Frye
... The most difficult discerning of a mans Dream, from his waking thoughts, is then, when by some accident we observe not that we have slept: which is easie to happen to a man full of fearfull thoughts; and whose conscience is much troubled; and that sleepeth, without the circumstances, of going ...
— Leviathan • Thomas Hobbes
... apprehend, that her obliging and artful Behaviour to her Lover, will for ever deprive you of a Heart which you might have kept at your Devotion. Kelirieu, whilst he was speaking, did not fail to observe the young Vorompdap's Countenance, and had the Pleasure of discerning the Vexation which she strove in vain to conceal. She was some Time without returning an Answer, but after composing herself, and putting a good Air upon the Confusion which the Thoughts of a Rival had excited, I could never have imagined, said she, with an affected Indifference, which, ...
— The Amours of Zeokinizul, King of the Kofirans - Translated from the Arabic of the famous Traveller Krinelbol • Claude Prosper Jolyot de Crbillon
... the mills, the gentlemen paused, and conversed for quite a quarter of an hour. The distance prevented Maud from discerning their countenances; but she could perceive the thoughtful, and as she fancied melancholy, attitude of the major, as, leaning on his fowling-piece, his lace was turned towards the Knoll, and his eyes were really riveted on the loop. ...
— Wyandotte • James Fenimore Cooper
... till he did know. The road was lined with trees, but they would give no shelter; for they were far apart, and the snow lay white between them. He was in the blue grass region. Tethering his horse in the timber, he climbed a tall oak by the roadside; but the mist was too thick to admit of his discerning anything distinctly. It seemed, however, to be breaking away, and he would wait until his way was clear; so he sat there, an hour, two hours, and ate his breakfast from the satchel John's wife had slung over his shoulder. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 96, October 1865 • Various
... regards the generality of minds; but to overcome this difficulty, when one has a mind eager for emotion, variable, with width and depth capable of discerning simultaneously the for and against of every thing, and thus being necessarily exposed to perplexity of choice, it is surely marvellous if a mind so constituted be also constant. Now, Lord Byron personified this marvel. ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... great play. Yet it will never be forgotten. Though mismanaged, it has the elements of a tremendous tragedy. In discerning the suitability of the Teutonic legend for this purpose Marlowe showed a far truer understanding of what tragedy should be, of the superior terrors of moral over material downfall, than he displayed in ...
— The Growth of English Drama • Arnold Wynne
... believer who receives the sacrament with consciousness of sin, by receiving it unworthily despises the sacrament, not in itself, but in its use. Hence the Apostle (1 Cor. 11:29) in assigning the cause of this sin, says, "not discerning the body of the Lord," that is, not distinguishing it from other food: and this is what he does who disbelieves ...
— Summa Theologica, Part III (Tertia Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas
... successful in intercepting the canoes. Notwithstanding this, the Indians in the canoe which was paddled exerted themselves with so much vigour, at the first apprehension of danger, that they escaped to the nearest land. The other canoe sailed on without discerning the English, till she was in the midst of them; but no sooner had she discovered them, than the people on board struck their sail, and plied their paddles so briskly, as to outrun the boat by which they were pursued. Being within hearing, Tupia called to them to come alongside, with ...
— Narrative of the Voyages Round The World, • A. Kippis
... to one [individual] is given by the Spirit the word of wisdom; to another the word of knowledge by the same Spirit; to another faith by the same Spirit; to another the gifts of healing by the same Spirit; to another the working of miracles; to another prophecy; to another discerning of spirits, to another divers kinds of tongues; to another the interpretation of tongues: but all these worketh that one and the selfsame Spirit, dividing to every man severally as he will." 1 Cor. 12:8-11. Nothing need be plainer. ...
— The Gospel Day • Charles Ebert Orr
... and Ben. They were discerning, and capable of grasping a dog man's point of view. "Then there's Queen, for one wheeler. You know we're only allowed three dogs, an' we got ...
— Baldy of Nome • Esther Birdsall Darling
... our hands as we grasp them; of empty titles of so-called "honor," builded upon prowess in war; the feverish race after wealth—cold as the marble palaces which it builds to shut in its worshippers—all these things are becoming skeleton-like and no longer deceive those who are even remotely discerning ...
— Cosmic Consciousness • Ali Nomad
... account of her life, written by herself, she says: "It is not the four legs nor the silky or shaggy coat of a dog which should prevent us from discerning his inner nature of thought and love; limited thought, it is true, but an unlimited love. That he is dumb, is to me only another claim (as it would be in a human child) on my consideration... Another ...
— Cole's Funny Picture Book No. 1 • Edward William Cole
... twos and threes, apparently racing, shrank together like elastic, and broke ranks again to swerve over the stretching waste. From this visioned pantomime presently came a sound, a tiny shot. The figures were too far for discerning which fired it. It evidently did no harm, and was repeated at once. A babel of diminutive explosions followed, while the horsemen galloped on in unexpected circles. Soon, for no visible reason, the dots ran together, bunching compactly. The shooting ...
— The Jimmyjohn Boss and Other Stories • Owen Wister
... Rejoiced at discerning there would be no objection made on the part of his temporary master, Mr. Cruickshanks assured him that Cairnvreckan, a village which they were about to enter, was happy in an excellent blacksmith; 'but as he was a professor, he ...
— Waverley, Or 'Tis Sixty Years Hence, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... said of him that he was a spontaneous clear man. Very gentle, too, though full of fire; simple, brave, graceful. What he did, and what he said, came from him as light from a luminous body, and had thus always in it a high and rare merit, which any of the more discerning could ...
— On the Choice of Books • Thomas Carlyle
... been bad enough, but worse was to follow. This discerning scamp had torn aside her veils of maiden reserve and exposed the secret fancy of her heart, unknown before even to herself. She had confessed love for this big-hearted sheriff and frontiersman. Here she could ...
— Bucky O'Connor • William MacLeod Raine
... of an earnest inquirer after truth, who was almost persuaded to declare himself a Roman Catholic, and who, while waiting for fuller illumination, was disposed to render every service in his power to the professors of the old faith. James, who was never very discerning, and who in religious matters was absolutely blind, suffered himself, notwithstanding all that he had seen of human knavery, of the knavery of courtiers as a class, and of the knavery of Sunderland in particular, to be duped into the belief that divine ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 2 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... at last sight of the grand old house. The dog knew her by this time and she did not fear him. She found the housekeeper busy with some sewing and glad to welcome her. Mrs. Jersey was that always. To-day she looked a little closer than usual at her visitor, discerning that Dolly's mind was not just in its wonted poise. And besides, she ...
— The End of a Coil • Susan Warner
... Indeed, it would have been better, so the reader may probably come to say to himself, if this attempted disguise had been entirely dispensed with. By the time he has reached the sixth essay, "Only Temper," the discerning reader, familiar with George Eliot's books, will be ready to affirm that this is no other than the author herself speaking very frankly and finely her own sentiments. In this essay the moral temper of her mind appears, and her strong inclination to subordinate the individual ...
— George Eliot; A Critical Study of Her Life, Writings & Philosophy • George Willis Cooke
... they waved, And while below, along their several beds, Murmured the sister streams of Life and Death, [r] Thus by conflicting passions pressed, my heart 440 Responded; "Honour to the patriot's zeal! Glory and hope to new-born Liberty! Hail to the mighty projects of the time! Discerning sword that Justice wields, do thou Go forth and prosper; and, ye purging fires, 445 Up to the loftiest towers of Pride ascend, Fanned by the breath of angry Providence. But oh! if Past and Future be the wings, On whose support harmoniously conjoined Moves the ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. III • William Wordsworth
... master, and his teachers, had wisely retired to their rooms. On such an occasion as this it is not wise on the part of discerning professors to see too much. There are matters to which one must shut one's eyes. And Dr. Morrison, from contact with many boys, was wise in his ...
— Andy at Yale - The Great Quadrangle Mystery • Roy Eliot Stokes
... a truthful and discerning study of a gifted child, and should be read by all who have children under their care. It is probably the best new girl's book of the ...
— When Grandmamma Was New - The Story of a Virginia Childhood • Marion Harland
... evincing strong practical common sense, and acute discrimination. Our author is a poet, but no mysticism or sentimentalism disfigures his pages; he is a clear, keen observer and analyzer of human nature, lashing its vices, discerning its foibles, and reading its subterfuges and petty vanities. He says: 'The only apologies which he offers for appearing as a censor and a teacher, are his love of men, his honest wish to do them good, and his sad consciousness ...
— The Continental Monthly, Volume V. Issue I • Various
... would have been more unsuitable than his father's snuff-box. Fred had overheard Mr. Jonah suggesting something about a "love-child," and with this thought in his mind, the stranger's face, which happened to be opposite him, affected him too ludicrously. Mary Garth, discerning his distress in the twitchings of his mouth, and his recourse to a cough, came cleverly to his rescue by asking him to change seats with her, so that he got into a shadowy corner. Fred was feeling as good-naturedly as possible towards everybody, ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... to say, understand the destiny of this child. The fact is that even the old Hanlin scholar Mr. Cheng was erroneously looked upon as a loose rake and dissolute debauchee! But unless a person, through much study of books and knowledge of letters, so increases (in lore) as to attain the talent of discerning the nature of things, and the vigour of mind to fathom the Taoist reason as well as to comprehend the first principle, he is not in a ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... deal with the prodigal. Such sense of justice as they possessed would have infallibly driven the penitent boy back to the comradeship of harlots, and have refused the penitent harlot the barest chance of reformation. Is not this enough to make the least discerning of us all suspect that Pharisees and elder brothers, for all their immaculate respectability of life, are by no means qualified to pass judgment on these tragedies of life with which they have no acquaintance, and cannot have an understanding ...
— The Empire of Love • W. J. Dawson
... young men from considerable distances were attracted to his church, and, generally speaking, they settled themselves in pews opposite the gallery in front of which sat Mr. Ormiston and his family. Any person who chanced to be in the vicinity, if of discerning powers, might have been conscious of the electricity in the air. Dull people ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Vol. XV., No. 85. January, 1875. • Various
... fell like manna the 'Poems descriptive of rural life and scenery.' Mr. John Taylor and his literary coadjutors had taken great pains to spread the news far and wide that a new Burns had been discovered on the margin of the Lincolnshire fens, and was to be publicly exhibited before a most discerning public. There were low rumours, besides, that William Gifford intended to place the new Burns on the pedestal of the 'Quarterly,' spreading the fame of the humble poet into the most distant regions. Accordingly, when the first volume of Clare's poems was published, on ...
— The Life of John Clare • Frederick Martin
... a gentleman who had something to sell, and consequently something to be advertised. The "advance notices,"—so he calls them,—thus obtained, are made part of his book, and may there be read alike by discerning and undiscerning readers. With equal ingenuity he has prefixed to it a title-page, the grammar of which is questionable and the punctuation vile, but in which he has contrived to represent his opinions as identical with those of Las Casas, the great historian of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 18, April, 1859 - [Date last updated: August 7, 2005] • Various
... twofold knowledge may be had about matters of belief. One is the knowledge of what one ought to believe by discerning things to be believed from things not to be believed: in this way knowledge is a gift and is common to all holy persons. The other is a knowledge about matters of belief, whereby one knows not only what one ought to believe, but also how to make the faith known, how to induce others ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas
... not say much—only listen. Mrs. Todd put in a discerning question now and then, and Mrs. Martin's eyes shone brighter and brighter as she talked. What a lovely gift of imagination and true affection was in this fond old heart! I looked about the plain New ...
— The Queen's Twin and Other Stories • Sarah Orne Jewett
... That bear'st a cheek for blows, a HEAD for WRONGS; Who hast not in thy brows an eye discerning Thine honour from thy sufferance; that not know'st, FOOLS do those villains pity, who are punished Before they have done their mischief. Where's thy drum? France spreads his banners in our noiseless land; With plumed helm thy slayer begins threats; ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon
... found in the fact that different persons have a natural vocation for different tasks. One of the chief justifications of the institution of higher historical teaching is, in our opinion, the opportunity afforded the teachers (presumably men of experience) of discerning in the students, in the course of their university career, either the germ of a vocation for critical scholarship, or fundamental unfitness for critical work, as the case may be.[110] Criticus non fit, sed nascitur. For one who is not endowed by nature ...
— Introduction to the Study of History • Charles V. Langlois
... that he does, the demon mixes up a great many illusions amid some truths, in order that the difficulty of discerning the true from the false may make mankind take the side which pleases them most, and that the incredulous may always have some points to maintain them in their incredulity. Although the apparitions of spirits, angels, and demons, and ...
— The Phantom World - or, The philosophy of spirits, apparitions, &c, &c. • Augustin Calmet
... leaving him a clear field for his operations. He felt a contempt for most of his victims, who were slow-witted Swedes, grasping neither the purport nor the magnitude of his operation, and as to those litigants who were discerning enough to see its enormity, he trusted to his ...
— The Spoilers • Rex Beach
... flustered at meeting them than a tree would be. Nature, the woods and mountains and prairies, had put their stamp upon him, had whispered their secrets to him, and civilization could not phase him. That was the way he struck the boys, who from being scouts had learned to be observant and discerning. ...
— Tom Slade at Temple Camp • Percy K. Fitzhugh
... believer in the faith of the Latter-day Saints a blessing of this kind, from under the hand of a Patriarch, was then, and is now, next to a boon of eternal life. A Patriarch is a man highly favored of God, possesses the gift of discerning spirits, and can read the present and future destiny of men. Patriarchal blessings strengthen, stimulate and encourage true Saints to press on to perfection while passing through this world of ...
— The Mormon Menace - The Confessions of John Doyle Lee, Danite • John Doyle Lee
... Dissenter doubtless thought him, he might haply have foreseen the vengeance of humanity upon his house. He might have known what Poland was and was yet to be; he might have known that he ate and drank to his damnation, discerning not the body ...
— The Crimes of England • G.K. Chesterton
... when she was not yet seventeen and Irene was twenty. But it was the truth. Irene was just what she had been a year ago—just what she would always be. Rilla Blythe's nature in that year had changed and matured and deepened. She found herself seeing through Irene with a disconcerting clearness—discerning under all her superficial sweetness, her pettiness, her vindictiveness, her insincerity, her essential cheapness. Irene had lost for ...
— Rilla of Ingleside • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... had grown a little calmer, Mrs. Nairn came in; and Mrs. Nairn was a discerning lady. It was not difficult to lead Evelyn on to speak of her visitors, for the girl's pride was broken and she felt in urgent need of sympathy; but when she had described the interview she felt impelled to avoid any discussion of the more important issues, even with ...
— Vane of the Timberlands • Harold Bindloss
... good family, to the corps of the Hetairoi; and how the vigorous old man's eyes sparkled as, with youthful enthusiasm, he spoke of the divine vanquisher of the world who had at that time condescended to address him, gazed at him keenly yet encouragingly with his all-discerning but kindly blue eyes, and extended his ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... listened to Bismarck's ideas on the future of Germany, and described them as the vapourings of a German baron. For a quarter of a century Disraeli had dazzled and amused the House of Commons without, as it seemed, drawing inspiration from any one great cause or discerning any one of the political goals towards which the nations of Europe were tending. At length, however, the time came for the realisation of his own imperial policy; and before the Eastern question had risen conspicuously ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe
... this view represented, as it is said, rather the private opinion of the Masonic pontiff, impressed by his strong personality on the lodges he controlled, and propagated by the instruction of his rituals. The more discerning among his disciples regarded it as the besetting weakness of their grand old man, and surreptitiously during his life-time the cultus of Satan pure and simple, that is, of devil-worship, the adoration of the evil principle as evil, was practised ...
— Devil-Worship in France - or The Question of Lucifer • Arthur Edward Waite
... boyhood, a vigorous youth, and a sober maturity; marry, beget sons and daughters, become old, enfeebled, even senile; and suffer neglect, if not death. In their advanced age they are exempted by the discerning from enterprises that call for a lusty agility, but are drafted into service by those to whom all levies are alike. Indeed in their very prime of manhood their vicissitudes are such as to make them seem human. Some rise in the world some ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... Thou, whose Own the way we fare hath trod, Give to thy children quick, discerning eyes To see in life upspringing from the sod All the divineness that within it lies, Till humble service lift us to the skies Who, "doubting nothing," seek thy will, ...
— Poems with Power to Strengthen the Soul • Various
... should undertake the task of ordering his thought would need to possess, in addition to the highest musical and dramatic qualifications a metaphysical habit of mind such as is rare at the present day, and a sympathetic capacity for discerning the grains of golden truth amidst the dross. He must construct anew. Wagner's theoretical edifice will not stand as it is; it is too loosely jointed; but the materials are valuable. That there will ever be a real science of aesthetics I do not believe; art would cease to be art if it ...
— Wagner's Tristan und Isolde • George Ainslie Hight
... pronounced to be the wisest of men—held upon this subject just before his death. In a word, when I consider the faculties with which the human mind is endued; its amazing celerity; its wonderful power in recollecting past events, and sagacity in discerning future; together with its numberless discoveries in the several arts and sciences, I feel a conscious conviction that this active, comprehensive principle can not possibly be of a mortal nature. And as this unceasing activity of the soul derives its energy from its own intrinsic and essential ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy
... The perception of the enlightened man will then be the taste of a healthy person who has made himself acquainted with the laws of evolution in art and in society, and is able to test the excellence of work in any stage, from immaturity to decadence, by discerning what there is of truth, sincerity, ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... very discerning sketch of the relation of these two men to the history of surgery in the address given at the St. Louis Congress in 1904 by Sir Clifford Allbutt.(20) They were strong men with practical minds and good hands, whose experience taught them wisdom. In both there was the blunt honesty ...
— The Evolution of Modern Medicine • William Osler
... human Voice, even in Speaking, are very powerful. It is well known, that in Oratory a just Modulation of it is of the highest Consequence. The Care Antiquity took to bring it to Perfection, is a sufficient Demonstration of the Opinion they had of its Power; and every body, who has a discerning Faculty, may have experienced that sometimes a Discourse, by the Power of the Orator's Voice, has made an Impression, which was lost ...
— Observations on the Florid Song - or Sentiments on the Ancient and Modern Singers • Pier Francesco Tosi
... 150 all told, passed through the gate unheralded by a single trumpet note; a purely military act with a minimum of military display told the people that the old order had changed, yielding place to new. The native mind, keen, discerning, receptive, understood the meaning and depth of this simplicity, and from the moment of high noon on December 11, 1917, when General Allenby went into the Mount Zion quarter of the Holy City, the British name ...
— How Jerusalem Was Won - Being the Record of Allenby's Campaign in Palestine • W.T. Massey
... desponding soul who had had the courage to face obloquy and change his party relations had only done so after prolonged and fruitless efforts to secure official place under his old party. Had he obtained it that party would still have seemed to him resolute, patriotic, and discerning, and he would have continued to serve his country in the association to which he ...
— From the Easy Chair, vol. 1 • George William Curtis
... been visited during my absence at the Cape by some traders and Griquas, and "their coffee did not taste half so nice as mine, because they loved his ivory and not himself." This was certainly an original mode of discerning character. ...
— Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa - Journeys and Researches in South Africa • David Livingstone
... looked at her and made a gesture of impotence—"I should never even attempt it, though I were to lose my head for not trying. In the first place," glancing from the trim, smooth, tailor-made black gown of his guest to the home-cut skirt and shirt-waist of his aunt, just entering, and dimly discerning the difference, "I never thought of it before, but I cannot even conceive how you get into and out of the things. I suppose you do, for I see you women in different ones at times, but my thought would be that they must grow upon you"—he was looking at Joyce—"as the ...
— Joyce's Investments - A Story for Girls • Fannie E. Newberry
... sleep in sober men and those who are gifted with a strong imagination. If the evaporation be very slight, not only does the imagination retain its freedom, but also the common sense is partly freed; so that sometimes while asleep a man may judge that what he sees is a dream, discerning, as it were, between things, and their images. Nevertheless, the common sense remains partly suspended; and therefore, although it discriminates some images from the reality, yet is it always deceived in some particular. ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I (Prima Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas
... full orb once a month. But ofttimes, though the artist may not flout the universe, he shows his carelessness of natural fact and needs the snubbing. It is in this range that the little critic walks triumphantly posing as a shrewd and a discerning one. He holds up inconsistencies with his deft thumb and finger and cries, "what a smart boy am I." And yet in spite of him Rubens, for the sake of a better line in the foreground of one of his greatest compositions dares ...
— Pictorial Composition and the Critical Judgment of Pictures • Henry Rankin Poore
... fame is world-wide and whose renown has reached to furthest lands. Doctor Ports has beautifully mounted the skull of that horse-stealing ignobility, Bear Creel. Stanton, who recently suffered the punishment due his many crimes at the hands of our local vigilance committee, a tribunal which under the discerning leadership of President Enright, never fails in the administration of justice. Doctor Peets will be glad to exhibit this memento mori to all who care to call. Doctor Peets, who is eminent as a phrenologist, ...
— Wolfville Days • Alfred Henry Lewis
... subsist; but instead of this we should have another virtue, not being the knowledge of good and evil, but of good only? So, if black should be wholly lost from among the colors, and any one should therefore contend that sight is also lost, for that there is no more the sense of discerning black and white, what should hinder us from answering him: It is no prejudice to us, if we have not what you call sight, but in lieu of that have another sense and faculty, by which we apprehend colors that are white and not white. For I indeed think that neither ...
— Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch
... soundness and justice in this suggestion, it may afford consolation to a considerable class of men and women: I mean those people who, feeling within themselves many defects of character, and discerning in their outward lot much which they would wish other than it is, are ready to think that some one thing would have put them right,—that some one thing would put them right even yet,—but something which they have hopelessly missed, something which can never be. There was just one ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 48, October, 1861 • Various
... [12] thought on as were necessarie for their setling and best ordering of y^e church affairs. And when they had lived at Amsterdam aboute a year, M^r. Robinson, their pastor, and some others of best discerning, seeing how M^r. John Smith and his companie was allready fallen in to contention with y^e church y^t was ther before them, & no means they could use would doe any good to cure y^e same, and also that y^e flames of contention were like to breake out in y^t anciente ...
— Bradford's History of 'Plimoth Plantation' • William Bradford
... references to "Dear Nephew James," "Unknown Recipient of an Old Man's Gratitude," "Discerning and Admirable James," ...
— At the Sign of the Jack O'Lantern • Myrtle Reed
... obvious from an examination of Mr. Bliss Perry's masterly study of James Russell Lowell and Mr. Carl Becker's subtle and discriminating analysis of The Education of Henry Adams. Both writers attack subjects of considerable complexity and difficulty, and both succeed in clarifying the thought of the discerning reader and inducing in him an exhilarating sense ...
— Modern American Prose Selections • Various
... condition, as it has in all the Northern States, old or new—Wisconsin furnishing the last example.[12] It may, therefore, be reasonably concluded that the "war-cry" was employed by the artful to inflame the minds of the less informed and less discerning; that it was adopted in utter disregard of the means by which negro emancipation might have been peaceably accomplished in the Territories, and with the sole object of obtaining sectional control and personal promotion by means of ...
— The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government • Jefferson Davis
... disappeared after the dreadful scene in the garden at Les Iles, how I had not seen him again for five years. Here I hesitated, little knowing how to tell the Vicomtesse of that affair in Louisville. Though I had a sense that I could not keep the truth from so discerning a person, I was startled to find ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... the two sets of children played together the two mothers sat on the terrace and talked. It was talk in which Edith was chiefly a listener, but a listener who couldn't deny that she was entertained. She was uncomfortable only when discerning compatriots appeared, and with visible nods and smiles rated them as "two of a kind." It was a kind over which she and Chip had smiled and nodded many a time during their wanderings in Europe, never thinking that she herself should ever ...
— The Letter of the Contract • Basil King
... was land; for when once their eyes had been directed to the proper point there was little difficulty in discerning it. Moreover, as the ship sped on, it rose rapidly above the horizon, the grey tint growing every moment darker and more distinct, and a few minutes later other land, more sharply defined in outline and ...
— The Log of the Flying Fish - A Story of Aerial and Submarine Peril and Adventure • Harry Collingwood
... entire sacrifice for God, when they were covetously withholding a portion for themselves. The Spirit of truth revealed to the apostles the real character of these pretenders, and the judgments of God rid the church of this foul blot upon its purity. This signal evidence of the discerning Spirit of Christ in the church was a terror to hypocrites and evil-doers. They could not long remain in connection with those who were, in habit and disposition, constant representatives of Christ; and as trials and persecution came upon ...
— The Great Controversy Between Christ and Satan • Ellen G. White
... hour's sullen tramping, they suddenly grew merry at their task, and fell to marching with a child-like cheer under their repulsive and groaning burden, he was surprised, and made inquiry as to the reason for this sudden complaisance. It turned out that one of the warriors, accounted more discerning than his fellows, had suggested that the captive was to be nursed back to health in order that he might be made an acceptable sacrifice to the Shining One. As this notion seemed to meet with such hearty approval, the wise Chief ...
— In the Morning of Time • Charles G. D. Roberts
... of our work, but hoping that it will do some acceptable service in the cause of good manners, and aid, in a humble way, in the building up of a truly American and republican school of politeness, we now submit it, with great deference, to a discerning public. ...
— How To Behave: A Pocket Manual Of Republican Etiquette, And Guide To Correct Personal Habits • Samuel R Wells
... title of Comfortable Words, of confirming the words of Absolution with those of Christ and His Apostles; and of holding forth our Lord and Saviour before the communicants, in the words of Holy Scripture to prepare them for 'discerning' His Body ...
— The American Church Dictionary and Cyclopedia • William James Miller
... have there always been among those who muse, and languish for God; violently they hate the discerning ones, and the latest ...
— Thus Spake Zarathustra - A Book for All and None • Friedrich Nietzsche
... to her showed that he was not more astonished than delighted at meeting, in the character of Sir Walter's daughter, the young lady who had so strongly struck his fancy at Lyme. He stopped an hour, and his tone, his expressions, his choice of subject, all showed the operation of a sensible, discerning mind. ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol. I • Various
... Misapprehensions People themselves have of their own State of Mind, is laid down with much discerning in the following Letter, which is but an Extract of a kind Epistle from my charming mistress Hecatissa, who is above the Vanity of external Beauty, and is the best Judge of the ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... of every-day life is reality in fragments,—the Alps split into paving-stones,—Achilles with a cold in the head. Seen in due connection, they make up the reality; but their prominence as they occur is casual and shifting, and the result dependent on the spectator's power of discerning, amid the endless series in which they are involved, more or less ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 76, February, 1864 • Various
... spectator seems to claim as the tribute answering to his praise in the dress of a young girl. She moved with perfect self-possession, distributing a few smiling looks to the people she knew as she advanced towards Lady Charlotte. Any one with a discerning eye could have seen that she was in that stage of youth when a beautiful woman is like a statue to which the master is giving the finishing touches. Life, the sculptor, had been at work upon her, refining here, softening there, ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... the generality of minds; but to overcome this difficulty, when one has a mind eager for emotion, variable, with width and depth capable of discerning simultaneously the for and against of every thing, and thus being necessarily exposed to perplexity of choice, it is surely marvellous if a mind so constituted be also constant. Now, Lord Byron personified this marvel. In him was seen the realization of that rare ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... discern what was illusory or misleading. The Master's answer was, "Give a foremost place to honesty and faithfulness, and tread the path of righteousness, and you will raise the standard of virtue. As to discerning what is illusory, here is an example of an illusion:—Whom you love you wish to live; whom you hate you wish to die. To have wished the same person to live and also to be dead—there ...
— Chinese Literature • Anonymous
... English demagogues, I have never met with a people more open to reason, more considerate in their tempers, more tractable by argument in the roughest times, than the English. They are remarkably quick at discerning and appreciating whatever is manly and honourable. They are, by nature and habit, methodical and orderly; and they feel the value of all that is regular and respectable. They may occasionally be deceived by sophistry, and excited into turbulence ...
— Bracebridge Hall, or The Humorists • Washington Irving
... her fancy went back, discerning how all things had worked together to this end. She saw how patience had ripened into hope, and suffering into joy. Not one step of the whole weary way had been trodden in vain—not one thorn had pierced her feet, that had not while entering there ...
— Olive - A Novel • Dinah Maria Craik, (AKA Dinah Maria Mulock)
... the little party proceed toward the entrance of the vast pavilion, which the females had no difficulty in discerning to be the habitation of the potent and dreaded chief into whose presence ...
— Wagner, the Wehr-Wolf • George W. M. Reynolds
... imagination (by no means to be confused with invention) is of the greatest possible importance in discerning the symbols which are of such endless shapes and variety. The seer has to find in the forms of the tea-leaves a resemblance, sometimes it may be but a faint one, to natural objects, e.g., trees, houses, flowers, bridges, and so forth. Figures of human beings and animals will frequently ...
— Telling Fortunes By Tea Leaves • Cicely Kent
... does has been misinterpreted. We distrust more and more circumstantial evidence. It is hideous. No jury ought to convict a man on evidence of circumstances. Too many tragedies have been enacted because of such. Marius thought he was discerning and of a sensitive honor. He thought it evident that Jean Valjean had slain Javert, and had slain Monsieur Madeleine, whose fortune he has offered as Cossette's marriage portion. Poor Jean Valjean! You a murderer, a marauder—you! ...
— A Hero and Some Other Folks • William A. Quayle
... with a frantic importunity that admitted no denial. However I disapproved, I couldn't hinder her: indeed, how could she have refused him herself? What was filling him with dread we had no means of discerning; but there he was, powerless under its gripe, and any addition seemed capable of shocking him into idiotcy. We reached the threshold; Catherine walked in, and I stood waiting till she had conducted the invalid to a chair, expecting ...
— Wuthering Heights • Emily Bronte
... not have been qualified for the duty of parish clerks sometimes argued questions of peace and war, of tribute and homage, with ability worthy of Halifax and Caermarthen, and that, at the Highland banquets, minstrels who did not know their letters sometimes poured forth rhapsodies in which a discerning critic might have found passages which would have reminded him of the tenderness of Otway or ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 3 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... gravelly and frozen ground. All, indeed, seemed to be in silent commotion through the town. Bart's object in coming for his gun, at such an hour of the night, was now sufficiently explained; for the quick and discerning mind of Miss Haviland at once told her that the country was indeed rising in arms to avenge the atrocities just committed by the party among whom were all her relatives and friends; and she shuddered at the thought of tomorrow, feeling, as she ...
— The Rangers - [Subtitle: The Tory's Daughter] • D. P. Thompson
... take the place of a discerning teacher. A knowledge of the philosophy of education in expression avails little without the ability to create the genial atmosphere conducive to the development of the student. The teacher is the gardener, his service—his full service—is ...
— The Evolution of Expression Vol. I • Charles Wesley Emerson
... how should we recognise impurity? It is light which makes us understand what darkness is. Many people not discerning in themselves certain particular vices think that they possess the opposite virtues, ...
— The Spirit of St. Francis de Sales • Jean Pierre Camus
... is so amiable; she sees good in every one," answered Miss Russell. "Annie is evidently not a lady, and I am glad at last to find some one of the girls who belong to the middle school capable of discerning this fact. Of course, we of the first class have nothing whatever to say to Miss Forest, but I really think Mrs. Willis is not acting quite fairly by the other girls when she allows a young person of that description into the school. I wish to assure you, Miss ...
— A World of Girls - The Story of a School • L. T. Meade
... what contemporary art owes to him it would be hard to compute. Without him the artists of genius and talent who to-day delight us with the significance and originality of their work might have remained port-bound for ever, ill-discerning their objective, wanting chart, rudder, and compass. Cezanne is the Christopher Columbus of a new continent of form. In 1839 he was born at Aix-en-Provence, and for forty years he painted patiently in the manner of his master Pissarro. To the eyes of the world he appeared, so ...
— Art • Clive Bell
... correctly, Miss Newville," his lordship replied, not discerning the quiet sarcasm. "Of course I am not, for if I lose, I curse my luck, and am ready to punch somebody's head, and rip out some swear words, but if I win, I am ready to bless the other fellow for playing a king when he should have laid down ...
— Daughters of the Revolution and Their Times - 1769 - 1776 A Historical Romance • Charles Carleton Coffin
... dealt with poor dear Bozzy! Croker's Boswell's Johnson "is as bad as bad can be," full of "monstrous blunders"—(he had put 1761 for 1766) "gross mistakes"—"for which a schoolboy would be flogged." Southey is "utterly destitute of the power of discerning truth from falsehood." He prints a joke which "is enough to make us ashamed of our species." Robert Montgomery pours out "a roaring cataract of nonsense." One of his tropes is "the worst similitude in the world." And yet Macaulay can rebuke Johnson ...
— Studies in Early Victorian Literature • Frederic Harrison
... exquisite, the most beautiful and the most lovable creature ever endowed with form and sent into the world by the powers of good. He believed all this in his heart, with the certainty of absolute knowledge. But he was quite incapable of discerning the motives of her conduct towards him, and when he tried to understand them, it was not his heart that felt, but his reason that argued, having very little knowledge and no experience at all to help it; and since his erring reason demonstrated something that ...
— Marietta - A Maid of Venice • F. Marion Crawford
... before entering Boldwood's house; but before he had weighed that information, this fatal event had been superimposed. However, it was too late now to think of sending another messenger, and he rode on, in the excitement of these self-inquiries not discerning, when about three miles from Casterbridge, a square-figured pedestrian passing along under the dark hedge in the same ...
— Far from the Madding Crowd • Thomas Hardy
... extraordinary fact, illustrative how far the ignorance of a discerning public will carry those who make a living by practising upon their credulity, that notwithstanding there is an immense number of books annually presented to the do-nothing world, under the curiosity-provoking title of fashionable novels, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various
... thinking is called the Understanding, and the power of volition is called the Will. And these two powers, or abilities, in the mind are denominated Faculties. Some of the modes of these simple ideas of reflection are remembrance, discerning, ...
— The World's Greatest Books—Volume 14—Philosophy and Economics • Various
... His fantastic story was certainly a strain upon one's credulity, I must confess; yet, I had sat face to face with him, and I am not without skill—nor was I at the time—in penetrating a man's outward aspect and discerning the sincerity of his purpose. In justice to him, I can not emphasize too strongly how convincing had been every utterance of his, the which I have been at some pains to record. And then, I could not attribute the freshly oiled hinges nor ...
— The Paternoster Ruby • Charles Edmonds Walk
... way to climb out of it," said Judge Saxon, advisedly, for it was the Judge who had the closest and most discerning eyes upon Neil Donovan's career. Listlessly at first, because he had looked on at too many uphill and losing fights against the world, but later with interest, forced from him almost against his will, ...
— The Wishing Moon • Louise Elizabeth Dutton
... those peculiar to a new country and so were without applicable precedents for their solution. What was chiefly demanded of an attorney in this situation was a capacity for attention, the ability to analyze an opponent's argument, and a discerning eye for fundamental issues. Competent observers soon made the discovery that young Marshall possessed all these faculties to a marked degree and, what was just as important, his modesty made recognition by ...
— John Marshall and the Constitution - A Chronicle of the Supreme Court, Volume 16 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Edward S. Corwin
... certainly supported by no evidence, while that significance which it really possessed in reference to natural processes was ignored, or even denied. An idealism which had consisted in understanding and discriminating values now became a superstition incapable of discerning existences. It added a prodigious fictitious setting to the cosmos in which man had to operate; it obscured his real interests and possible happiness by seeking to transport him into that unreal environment, with its fantastic and ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... by a Caesar. Yet did our hero in these days Pick up some laurel-wreaths of praise; And as the statuary of Seville Made his cracked saint an excellent devil. So, though our war small triumph brings, We gained great fame in other things. Did not our troops show great discerning, And skill, your various arts in learning? Outwent they not each native noodle By far, in playing Yankee-doodle? Which, as 'twas your New England tune, 'Twas marvellous they took so soon. And ere the year was fully through, Did they not learn to foot ...
— Choice Specimens of American Literature, And Literary Reader - Being Selections from the Chief American Writers • Benj. N. Martin
... celebrity she had won in that wider world outside Briar Farm—was it fair or honest to her that he should take advantage of her weak and half- distraught condition and allow her to become his wife?—she, whose genius was already acknowledged by a wide and discerning public, and who might be considered as only at the beginning of a brilliant ...
— Innocent - Her Fancy and His Fact • Marie Corelli
... depths, leading down, all men now ask: Whitherwards? A much-admired invention in its time, that of letting go the rudder, or setting a wooden figure expensively dressed to take charge of it, and discerning that the ship would sail of itself so much more easily! Which it will, if a peculiarly good seaboat, in certain kinds of sea,—for a time. Till the Sinbad "Magnetic Mountains" begin to be felt pulling, or the circles of Charybdis get you in their sweep; and then what an invention it was!—This, ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Volume V. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... of the three was but two-and-twenty. One was seated on the deck, leaning back and apparently dozing; the second stood, less sleepily, but quite as idly, beside him: the last, with folded arms, was gazing out to sea, yet discerning nothing, for his thoughts were evidently elsewhere. The second of the trio appeared to be in a musical humour, for snatches of different songs kept coming ...
— Clare Avery - A Story of the Spanish Armada • Emily Sarah Holt
... the only remaining function of royalty—that of rewarding services, and conferring honours—could no longer be tolerated; and the justice and wisdom of Your Imperial Majesty in dissolving such an assembly will be duly appreciated by discerning men, and by those whose love of good order and their country supersedes their ambition or personal interests. There are, however, individuals who will wickedly take advantage of the late proceedings ...
— Narrative of Services in the Liberation of Chili, Peru and Brazil, - from Spanish and Portuguese Domination, Volume 2 • Thomas Cochrane, Tenth Earl of Dundonald
... the passage, heard it and laughed in his heart. What need had he of experience? Experience teaches us in a millennium what passion teaches us in an hour. A Kaffer studies all his life the discerning of distant sounds; but he will never hear my step, when my love hears it, coming to her window in the dark ...
— The Story of an African Farm • (AKA Ralph Iron) Olive Schreiner
... around the illimitable field of ocean, in hope of discerning some indication of that power whose ships I had been told traversed every sea; but nothing like a vessel was in sight —the mighty waters stretched out like an endless desert on every side. There was no sign of man in all this vast space, except our little boat; and in comparison with this space, ...
— The Little Savage • Captain Marryat
... was accepted?" murmured Straws. "Discerning Tortier! Excellent dilettante! Let him henceforth be known as a man of taste!" Here the poet critically examined the bottle. "Nothing vapid, thin or characterless there!" he added, holding it before the blaze in the grate. "Positively I'll dedicate my forthcoming book to him. ...
— The Strollers • Frederic S. Isham
... the poison that they circulate under a thousand different forms. These germs, often imperceptible to the eyes of the vulgar, are afterwards developed by the adepts of the Societies they frequent, and the most obscure wording is thus brought to the understanding of the least discerning. It is above all in the Universities that Illuminism has always found and always will find numerous recruits. Those professors who belong to the Association set out from the first to study the character of their pupils. If a student gives ...
— Secret Societies And Subversive Movements • Nesta H. Webster
... to have read that the NOSES of the New Yorkers, in particular, were materially larger than common. When the supercilious and vapid point out faults, they ever run into contradictions and folly; it is only under the lash of the discerning and the experienced, that we betray by our writhings the power of ...
— Autobiography of a Pocket-Hankerchief • James Fenimore Cooper
... reasons aforesaid. Nor let any State think they are able to make such sure parties, but rather that they are all doubtfull; for in the order of things we find it alwaies, that whensoever a man seeks to avoid one inconvenient, he incurs another. But the principal point of judgement, is in discerning between the qualities of inconvenients, and not taking the bad for the good. Moreover a Prince ought to shew himself a lover of vertue, and that he honors those that excel in every Art. Afterwards ought he encourage his Citizens, whereby they may be ...
— Machiavelli, Volume I - The Art of War; and The Prince • Niccolo Machiavelli
... p. 318) says that Johnson told him 'that in his whole life he was never capable of discerning the least resemblance of any kind between a picture and the subject it was intended to represent.' This, however must have been an exaggeration on the part either of Hawkins or Johnson. His general ignorance of art is shown by Mrs. Piozzi (Anec., p. 98):—'Sir ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... blessed forerunner, the most excellent of Saints, John Baptist, being full of joy in Thy presence, leapt while yet in the womb of his mother, for joy in the Holy Ghost; and afterwards discerning Jesus walking amongst men, humbled himself exceedingly, and said, with devout affection, The friend of the bridegroom, who standeth and heareth him, rejoiceth greatly because of the bridegroom's voice;(2) even so I wish to be inflamed ...
— The Imitation of Christ • Thomas a Kempis
... new conquest. She had a quick sensibility, which too frequently discovered itself in the immediate resentment of injuries or neglect. She had, besides, acquired the dangerous character of a wit; but to which she had no real pretensions, although the most discerning critic, hearing her converse, might fall into this mistake. Her replies had all the effect of repartee, not because she possessed those qualities which can properly be called wit, but that what she said ...
— A Simple Story • Mrs. Inchbald
... rather red-faced; a beefy, taciturn type, with a trap-like mouth and thoughtful discerning eyes. He struck me as being one with whom most men would like to be friendly, but who would ...
— The Death-Traps of FX-31 • Sewell Peaslee Wright
... black night shall fall in gloom, The Hellenes would no longer stay, but leap Each on the benches of his bark, and save Hither and thither by stolen flight their lives. He, when he heard thereof, discerning not The Hellene's craft, no, nor the spite of heaven, To all his captains gives this edict forth: When as the sun doth cease to light the world, And darkness holds the precincts of the sky, They should dispose the fleet in three close ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... meant a strong, intelligent yielding to the Holy Spirit. It does not mean that His natural faculties of mind and will and heart were held down, not to be used. It means that they were actively, studiously used in discerning the Holy Spirit's leading, and in doing as He directed. And it means that so there came a fulness of life, an increasing life, into His faculties, mind and will and heart. Our Lord Jesus used all His powers in yielding ...
— Quiet Talks on Following the Christ • S. D. Gordon
... the Spirit the word of wisdom; to another the word of knowledge by the same Spirit; to another faith by the same Spirit; to another the gifts of healing by the same Spirit; to another the working of miracles; to another prophecy; to another discerning of spirits; to another divers kinds of tongues; to another the interpretation of tongues; but all these worketh that one and the selfsame Spirit, dividing to every man severally as he will" (1 Cor. ...
— The Last Reformation • F. G. [Frederick George] Smith
... of Saint Evremond than she could ever persuade Rousseau to think. Two or three years later than this he began to use his own mind more freely, and opened his eyes for the first time to the greatest question that ever dawns upon any human intelligence that has the privilege of discerning it, the problem of a philosophy and a body ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... the sick; and for all he had the priestly ministrations of his own Christ-like heart. The celebrated Professor Tholuck, one of the most learned men of modern Germany, was an early protege of the old Baron's, who, discerning his talents, put him in the way of a liberal education. In his earlier years, like many others of the young who play with life, ignorant of its needs, Tholuck piqued himself on a lordly skepticism with regard to the commonly received Christianity, and even wrote an essay to ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 87, January, 1865 • Various
... fragmentary and disjointed state of his manuscripts, I have felt wholly unable to do; yet, being unwilling that the reader should be deprived of such parts of his lucubrations as seemed more finished, and not well discerning how to segregate these from the rest, I have concluded to send them all to the ...
— The Biglow Papers • James Russell Lowell
... however, in "Janet's Repentance" that the power of the author is put most strongly forth, and also that what we conceive to be the vital aim of her works is most definitely and firmly pronounced. Here also we have illustrated that breadth of nature, that power of discerning the true and good under whatsoever external form it may wear, which is almost a necessary adjunct of the author's true and large ideal of the Christian life. She goes, it might almost seem, out of her way to select, from that theological school with which her whole nature is most entirely at dissonance, ...
— The Ethics of George Eliot's Works • John Crombie Brown
... almost uncanny faculty of discerning latent talent in the line of his profession. You may not know one dance step from another, yet his discerning eye will detect a possibility for you in some branch of the dancing art that results will later prove as correct as ...
— The Art of Stage Dancing - The Story of a Beautiful and Profitable Profession • Ned Wayburn
... knows other men is discerning; he who knows himself is intelligent. He who overcomes others is strong; he who overcomes himself is mighty. He who is satisfied with his lot is rich; he who goes on acting with ...
— Tao Teh King • Lao-Tze
... collected will; mixed with a certain bitterness, partly derived from temperament, and partly from the general cast of his feelings and reflections. The dissatisfaction with life and the world, felt more or less in the present state of society and intellect by every discerning and highly conscientious mind, gave in his case a rather melancholy tinge to the character, very natural to those whose passive moral susceptibilities are more than proportioned to their active energies. For it must be said, that the strength of will of which his manner seemed to give ...
— Autobiography • John Stuart Mill
... defined, its influence is of course less powerful; for it is difficult to apply with certainty and firmness a law which is not distinctly known. Public opinion, the natural and supreme interpreter of the laws of honor, not clearly discerning to which side censure or approval ought to lean, can only pronounce a hesitating judgment. Sometimes the opinion of the public may contradict itself; more frequently it does not ...
— Democracy In America, Volume 2 (of 2) • Alexis de Tocqueville
... more discerning. He had come across an iridescent glass jar, and was edging around for an opportunity to ask Kling the price without letting Felix overhear him—it being an occasion, he knew, in which Mr. O'Day would feel offended if business were mentioned. "Might do to put in my window, if it didn't ...
— Felix O'Day • F. Hopkinson Smith
... make obvious the superiority of his ambition to all thought of material advancement. He offered his thanks, and promised to give an account of himself (as in duty bound) at the close of the twelvemonths' study he was about to undertake: a letter in which the discerning would have read much sincerity, and some pathos; after all, not a letter to be ashamed of. Lady Whitelaw would not understand it; but then, how many people are capable of even faintly apprehending ...
— Born in Exile • George Gissing
... naturally not without difficulty that I won my way to the presence of so busy and influential a publicist. A man who spends his whole time in instructing the readers of so many different papers in the delicate art of discerning the best and ignoring the rest cannot have much margin ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, May 27, 1914 • Various
... he must believe that these same illiterate men, who were capable of so much, were also capable of projecting a system of doctrine singularly remote from all ordinary and previous speculation; of discerning the necessity of taking under their special patronage those passive virtues which man least loved, and found it must difficult to cultivate; and of exhibiting, in their preference of the spiritual to the ceremonial, ...
— Reason and Faith; Their Claims and Conflicts • Henry Rogers
... finally if it could be shown that with the spread of education and the growth of popular intelligence a man of great and commanding ability without money would not have a much better chance of election at the hands of a large constituency than by the mere favor of some discerning patron. Sir Robert Inglis also used an argument which is even still not unfamiliar in political debate, whether inside or outside Parliament. He contended not merely that the English population had no real grievances to complain of, but that ...
— A History of the Four Georges and of William IV, Volume IV (of 4) • Justin McCarthy and Justin Huntly McCarthy
... for the wrong thing, to the wrong place. We are like those Corinthians who came to the Lord's supper not to be made good men, but to exalt their own spiritual self-conceit; and so only ate and drank their own damnation, not discerning the Lord's body, that it was a holy body, a body of righteousness ...
— Town and Country Sermons • Charles Kingsley
... long maintained. All discerning persons were convinced of the necessity to face and drive back an aggressive rival on the high seas. It was recognized that ironclads were needed for this, since the aggressor would have them at his disposal. But this policy, it was thought, ...
— Germany and the Next War • Friedrich von Bernhardi
... the discerning eye, the purity would not be absolute. The careful searcher might detect, in the virgin soil, the first faint traces of an unexpected vein. In that conventual existence visits were exciting events; and, as ...
— Queen Victoria • Lytton Strachey
... kind of memory which enables a person "to read a photographic copy of former impressions with his mind's eye is not, indeed, commonly associated with high intellectual power," and gives as a reason that such a mind is hindered by the very wealth of material furnished by the memory from discerning the relations between separate facts upon which judgment and reasoning depend. It is likewise a common source of surprise among teachers that many of the pupils who could outstrip their classmates in learning and memory do not turn out to be able men. ...
— The Mind and Its Education • George Herbert Betts
... were the earlier exiles of Ephraim under Tiglath-pileser III. and Sargon. The greater number of the Jews, however, remained faithful to their hopes of future greatness, and applied themselves to discerning in passing events the premonitory signs of deliverance. "Like as a woman with child, that draweth near the time of her delivery, is in pain, and crieth out in her pangs; so have we been before Thee, O Lord.... Come, my people, enter thou into thy chambers, and shut thy doors about thee: hide thyself ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 9 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... thinking of the destiny, but more than all else just now he was thinking of the woman before him and the issue to be faced by him regarding her. His thoughts were not so clear nor so discerning as Detricand's. No more than he understood Guida did he understand this clear-eyed, still, self-possessed woman. He thought her cold, unsympathetic, barren of that glow which should set the pulses of a man like himself bounding. ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... distinctly visible upon the dusky bosom of the moving water. He was swimming up-stream with a leisurely movement, doubtless on the lookout for a place where he might land with safety, while on the opposite shore there was no difficulty in discerning the shadowy forms of the sentries, erect and motionless in the semi-obscurity. There came a sudden flash that tore the black veil of night, a report that went with bellowing echoes and spent itself among the rocks of Montimont. The water ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola
... love with Bob Evers, at least as well as he with her. Was this, then, the way in which a woman would be likely to speak of the young man with whom she had fallen in love? To me the appreciation sounded too frank and discerning and acute. Yet I could not call it dispassionate, and frankness was this woman's outstanding merit, though I was beginning to discover others as well. Moreover, the fact remained that they had been greatly talked ...
— No Hero • E.W. Hornung
... from the year before. It was in perfect condition and quite near enough the style of the moment to pass unnoticed. Sylvia saw nothing to be ashamed of in her mother's unaccented and neutral costume, but there was no denying that she looked exactly like any one else. What was most apparent to the discerning eye was that her garb had been organized in every detail so as to consume as little thought and effort as possible. Whereas Aunt Victoria—Sylvia's earnest and thoughtful efforts at home-dressmaking had fitted her, if for nothing else, for a full appreciation of Mrs. Marshall-Smith's ...
— The Bent Twig • Dorothy Canfield
... the men began to cook food, while the surgeons moved here and there, binding up the wounds of the hurt. The pleasant odors of coffee and frying meat arose. Sergeant Whitley stood up and by the moonlight and the fires scanned the country about them with discerning eye. Dick looked at him with renewed interest. He was a man of middle years, but with all the strength and elasticity of youth. Despite his thick coat of tan he was naturally fair, and Dick noticed that his hands were the largest that he had ever seen on any human being. ...
— The Guns of Shiloh • Joseph A. Altsheler
... occupier of the soil; though in the present case it would be too easy to prove that melancholy fact.[46] I therefore applauded my right honorable friend, who, when he canvassed the Company's accounts, as a preliminary to a bill that ought not to stand on falsehood of any kind, fixed his discerning eye and his deciding hand on these debts of the Company from the Nabob of Arcot and Rajah of Tanjore, and at one stroke expunged them all, as utterly irrecoverable: he might have added, ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. III. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... but as ye would not suffer me, the things belonging to your peace are now hid from your eyes. Ye would not attend to the impressions by God's Holy Spirit, when your feelings were tender and penetrable, and therefore now, the day having passed over, ye have lost the power of discerning them. ...
— A Portraiture of Quakerism, Volume II (of 3) • Thomas Clarkson
... self-aggrandisement, he was enabled coolly to exercise his powers of mind in forming a just estimate of men and things. He possessed strong common sense, which, being balanced by a high moral tone, and refined sensibilities, enabled him to be quick in discerning the characters of men, but tenderly careful of their feelings and reputation. I do not think his mind was of a metaphysical cast. He never willingly engaged in argument of any kind, nor conversed upon abstruse subjects. He might have said, with David, "Lord, my heart is not haughty, nor mine eyes ...
— A Biographical Sketch of the Life and Character of Joseph Charless - In a Series of Letters to his Grandchildren • Charlotte Taylor Blow Charless
... him; the other was a constitutional tendency to come out of himself, to lose himself in objects, especially in natural objects, so that in the study of nature—to which he devoted a large part of his life—he seems not so much a scientific observer as a chosen confidant, to whom the discerning Mother revealed ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIII • John Lord
... sensation, but by the acuteness of interpretation of primitive peoples. Take the savage into the streets of a busy city and see what a number of sights and sounds he will neglect because of their meaninglessness to him. Take the sailor whose powers of discerning a ship on the horizon appear to the landsman so extraordinary, and set him to detect micro-organisms in the field of a microscope. Is it then surprising that primitive man should be able to draw inferences which to the stranger appear marvelous, from the merest specks in the far distance or from ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... also has its weakness, for it is difficult to make people believe in the reality of a life that has not been actually lived. Still, this difficulty is not fatal; for experiments in living are constantly being made all around us, which the discerning novelist needs only to observe and report. He can show the success of these or how, if they fail, their failure is due, not to anything inherently vicious, but simply to adverse law and opinion. Life is full of such stories ...
— The Principles Of Aesthetics • Dewitt H. Parker
... was decked with every possible rarity and curiosity, in ornaments of jewels, purple, and gold, that could make a grand and gorgeous spectacle of him. Now when Solon came before him, and seemed not at all surprised, nor gave Croesus those compliments he expected, but showed himself to all discerning eyes to be a man that despised the gaudiness and petty ostentation of it, he commanded them to open all his treasure houses, and carry him to see his sumptuous furniture and luxuries though he did not wish it; Solon could judge of him well enough by the first sight of him; ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
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