All 8 Uses of
discerning
in
Middlemarch
- Across all her imaginative adornment of those whom she loved, there darted now and then a keen discernment, which was not without a scorching quality.†
Chpt 1 *
- To be a poet is to have a soul so quick to discern that no shade of quality escapes it, and so quick to feel, that discernment is but a hand playing with finely ordered variety on the chords of emotion—a soul in which knowledge passes instantaneously into feeling, and feeling flashes back as a new organ of knowledge.†
Chpt 2
- 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.†
Chpt 4
- When the commonplace "We must all die" transforms itself suddenly into the acute consciousness "I must die—and soon," then death grapples us, and his fingers are cruel; afterwards, he may come to fold us in his arms as our mother did, and our last moment of dim earthly discerning may be like the first.†
Chpt 4
- To Mr. Casaubon now, it was as if he suddenly found himself on the dark river-brink and heard the plash of the oncoming oar, not discerning the forms, but expecting the summons.†
Chpt 4
- But even his proud outspokenness was checked by the discernment that it was as useless to fight against the interpretations of ignorance as to whip the fog; and "good fortune" insisted on using those interpretations.†
Chpt 5
- "But not when he tells any ugly-looking truth about you," said discerning consciousness.†
Chpt 5
- Having been roused to discern consequences which he had never been in the habit of tracing, he was preparing to act on this discernment with some of the rigor (by no means all) that he would have applied in pursuing experiment.†
Chpt 6
Definition:
-
(discerning) showing good judgment or good taste and/or the perception of things not easily perceived by most people