Top Ten Quotes: All That’s Good

Hannah Anderson’s All That’s Good: Recovering the Lost Art of Discernment made its way to my summer reading list this year, and I’m glad it did. It’s a book that needs to be savored, lingered over, and meditated on. And it’s a book that reminds us that – no, the world is not hopelessly broken. All That’s Good restores a bit of sanity into society, and helps us to look up to see how God is still working.

Here are my top ten favorite quotes:

• …the goal of discernment is not to simply avoid the evil in this life; it is to learn what is good so that we might embrace and enjoy it.
• …[King] Solomon began to understand that his problem wasn’t so much what he was pursuing as how he was pursuing it.
• If we don’t have a strong commitment to reality outside our own feelings and opinions, we can end up living a false reality. In this reality, whatever we feel or believe to be true becomes truth for us.
• We must be willing to test, question, doubt – not the truth, but our own certainty and our own motivations.
• Because transparency is rare in an age of image crafting, it’s also valuable, and exposing our unfiltered self can become a way to seek approval. To signal how little we care about what people think of us, we will parade our faults. We’ll storm and swear and delight in disrupting established norms – all while performing to audience expectations.
• We want the world to be the way it should be only to find that we ourselves are not what we should be.
• If we spend our days sharing trivialities, life will be trivial. If we spend our days focused on what we fear, life will be filled with anxiety. If, however, we spend our days talking about good, worthy, glorious things, there is the strong likelihood that our lives will be filled with good, worthy, glorious things.
• …discernment is knowing the difference between what is good and what is better.

Discernment is knowing the difference between what is good and what is better. - Hannah Anderson Click To Tweet

• If someone is teaching or saying something that no one else is, there’s usually a reason for that. And it’s rarely good. Instead of seeking a private experience of wisdom, we are seeking common wisdom.
• …seeking goodness in community means giving attention, not to how others need to change but to how we need to change, to practicing the age-old wisdom of being “strict with ourselves and generous with everyone else.”

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