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
Pastor, Mt. Leonard Baptist Church, SBC
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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.
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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."
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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.
Pastor, Mt. Leonard Baptist Church, SBC
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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.
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Here are more details:
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Best I can come up with is "often attributed to Charles Spurgeon." I hate these quasi-quotes. They might be accurate but might be mythological at the same time. It's an ethical dilemma. We want to give credit where credit is due, but how do you give credit where there are no citations to prove provenance? Well, like Abraham Lincoln said, "Don't believe everything you read on the internet."
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Just cite some dubious website...
Tbh, I doubt it's from Spurgeon.
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I couldn't find a single attribution of the quote from the 20th century. They all appear in resources of the past 15 years or so.
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I hate these quasi-quotes. They might be accurate but might be mythological at the same time. It's an ethical dilemma.
I am FULLY with you. If I thought it worth citing, I would probably hedge the citation: "Some have attributed..."
If I use the quote in my paper, that's what I am going to preface it with.
Pastor, Mt. Leonard Baptist Church, SBC
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