Finding a Spurgeon Quote

There's a quote attributed to Spurgeon about discernment:

"Discernment is not knowing the difference between right and wrong. It is knowing the difference between right and almost right."

I'm having a hard time searching for the quote in Logos to find it's sources (for citation in a paper), or to see if it's even from Spurgeon. Any ideas in what I can do?

-Jon

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Comments

Matt Hamrick

What I would do is grab the quote and search Spurgeons work. If you get nothing search your entire library and if you still get nothing search Google. Then if you get nothing it's not a quote from anyone.

David P. Moore

I'm finding several books in my Logos library that confidently attribute that quote to him, but there is either no citation for it, or the citation references another non-Spurgeon source, or a website on quotes. Can find nothing close in my Spurgeon books.

BTW, I'm finding it more often rendered as:

"Discernment is not a matter of simply telling the difference between right and wrong; rather, it is telling the difference between right and almost right."

Jonathan Bradley

I'm finding several books in my Logos library that confidently attribute that quote to him, but there is either no citation for it, or the citation references another non-Spurgeon source, or a website on quotes. Can find nothing close in my Spurgeon books.

BTW, I'm finding it more often rendered as:

"Discernment is not a matter of simply telling the difference between right and wrong; rather, it is telling the difference between right and almost right."

David, can you show me what you searched to find it (if different than the quote) and also what books are coming up in your library that attribute it to Spurgeon? I'm guessing I don't have any books that do so. I'm wondering if the original quote carries that meaning but is worded completely different as I have seen with some quotes from the likes of Calvin and Spurgeon.

David P. Moore

Yes, I did

discernment WITHIN 30 WORDS "almost right"

to try to pick up all the variations. I just simply chose to focus on that word and that phrase, with the assumption that those terms would have to be part of what I was looking for.

In my library, 8 resources come back (below). I'll expand it in another post.

David P. Moore

Here are more details: