Sydney J. Harris quotes
-
The whole purpose of education is to turn mirrors into windows.
-- Sydney J. Harris -
Happiness is a direction, not a place.
-- Sydney J. Harris -
Our dilemma is that we hate change and love it at the same time; what we really want is for things to remain the same but get better.
-- Sydney J. Harris -
Regret for the things we did can be tempered by time; it is regret for the things we did not do that is inconsolable.
-- Sydney J. Harris -
-
When I hear somebody sigh, 'Life is hard,' I am always tempted to ask, 'Compared to what?'
-- Sydney J. Harris -
The time to relax is when you don't have time for it.
-- Sydney J. Harris -
It's surprising how many persons go through life without ever recognizing that their feelings toward other people are largely determined by their feelings toward themselves, and if you're not comfortable within yourself, you can't be comfortable with others.
-- Sydney J. Harris -
The three hardest tasks in the world are neither physical feats nor intellectual achievements, but moral acts: to return love for hate, to include the excluded, and to say, 'I was wrong'.
-- Sydney J. Harris -
-
Nobody can be so amusingly arrogant as a young man who has just discovered an old idea and thinks it is his own.
-- Sydney J. Harris -
Many married couples separate because they quarrel incessantly, but just as many separate because they were never honest enough or courageous enough to quarrel when they should have.
-- Sydney J. Harris -
We evaluate others with a Godlike justice, but we want them to evaluate us with a Godlike compassion.
-- Sydney J. Harris -
The two words 'information' and 'communication' are often used interchangeably, but they signify quite different things. Information is giving out; communication is getting through.
-- Sydney J. Harris -
-
Almost no one is foolish enough to imagine that he automatically deserves great success in any field of activity; yet almost everyone believes that he automatically deserves success in marriage.
-- Sydney J. Harris -
When you run into someone who is disagreeable to others, you may be sure he is uncomfortable with himself; the amount of pain we inflict upon others is directly proportional to the amount we feel within us.
-- Sydney J. Harris -
Parents - and teachers too - are woefully short-sighted when they try to protect the child from his mistakes, when they make the "right answer" more important than the quest for knowledge and good judgment. For what is not learned within one's self cannot be learned from another.
-- Sydney J. Harris -
Maturity begins when we're content to feel we're right about something without feeling the necessity to prove someone else wrong.
-- Sydney J. Harris -
-
The best thing you can give children, next to good habits, are good memories.
-- Sydney J. Harris -
A winner knows how much he still has to learn, even when he is considered an expert by others; a loser wants to be considered an expert by others before he has learned enough to know how little he knows.
-- Sydney J. Harris -
The difference between patriotism and nationalism is that the patriot is proud of his country for what it does, and the nationalist is proud of his country no matter what it does; the first attitude creates a feeling of responsibility, but the second a feeling of blind arrogance that leads to war.
-- Sydney J. Harris -
Almost every man looks more so in a belted trench coat.
-- Sydney J. Harris -
-
The best combination of parents consists of a father who is gentle beneath his firmness, and a mother who is firm beneath her gentleness.
-- Sydney J. Harris -
We can often endure an extra pound of pain far more easily than we can suffer the withdrawal of an ounce of accustomed pleasure.
-- Sydney J. Harris -
The greatest enemy of progress is not stagnation, but false progress.
-- Sydney J. Harris -
The difference between faith and superstition is that the first uses reason to go as far as it can, and then makes the jump; the second shuns reason entirely — which is why superstition is not the ally, but the enemy, of true religion.
-- Sydney J. Harris -
-
We have not passed that subtle line between childhood and adulthood until we have stopped saying 'It got lost,' and say, 'I lost it.'
-- Sydney J. Harris -
Most people are mirrors, reflecting the moods and emotions of the times; few are windows, bringing light to bear on the dark corners where troubles fester. The whole purpose of education is to turn mirrors into windows.
-- Sydney J. Harris -
The art of listening needs its highest development in listening to oneself; our most important task is to develop an ear that can really hear what we're saying.
-- Sydney J. Harris -
Self-discipline without talent can often achieve astounding results, whereas talent without self-discipline inevitably dooms itself to failure.
-- Sydney J. Harris -
-
Man's unique agony as a species consists in his perpetual conflict between the desire to stand out and the need to blend in.
-- Sydney J. Harris -
The beauty of 'spacing' children many years apart lies in the fact that parents have time to learn the mistakes that were made with the older ones - which permits them to make exactly the opposite mistakes with the younger ones.
-- Sydney J. Harris -
The most important thing in an argument, next to being right, is to leave an escape hatch for your opponent, so that he can gracefully swing over to your side without too much apparent loss of face.
-- Sydney J. Harris -
The commonest fallacy among women is that simply having children makes them a mother - which is as absurd as believing that having a piano makes one a musician.
-- Sydney J. Harris -
-
There's no point in burying a hatchet if you're going to put up a marker on the site.
-- Sydney J. Harris -
Democracy is the only system that persists in asking the powers that be whether they are the powers that ought to be.
-- Sydney J. Harris -
Men make counterfeit money; in many more cases, money makes counterfeit men.
-- Sydney J. Harris -
The primary purpose of a liberal education is to make one's mind a pleasant place in which to spend one's leisure.
-- Sydney J. Harris -
-
The real danger is not that computers will begin to think like men, but that men will begin to think like computers.
-- Sydney J. Harris -
The art of living consists in knowing which impulses to obey and which must be made to obey.
-- Sydney J. Harris -
If a small thing has the power to make you angry, does that not indicate something about your size?
-- Sydney J. Harris -
As we grow older, we should learn that these are two quite different things. Character is something you forge for yourself; temperament is something you are born with and can only slightly modify. Some people have easy temperaments and weak characters; others have difficult temperaments and strong characters. We are all prone to confuse the two in assessing people we associate with. Those with easy temperaments and weak characters are more likable than admirable; those with difficult temperaments and strong characters are more admirable than likable.
-- Sydney J. Harris -
-
As the horsepower in modern automobiles steadily rises, the congestion of traffic steadily lowers the average possible speed of your car. This is known as Progress.
-- Sydney J. Harris -
Genealogy: A perverse preoccupation of those who seek to demonstrate that their forebears were better people than they are.
-- Sydney J. Harris -
As long as there are human beings, there will be the idea of brotherhood -- and an almost total inability to practice it.
-- Sydney J. Harris -
The reason that truth is stranger than fiction is that fiction has to have a rational thread running through it in order to be believable, whereas reality may be totally irrational.
-- Sydney J. Harris -
-
Ancient boundaries are meaningless, except for political purposes; old divisions of clan and tribe are sentimental remnants of the pre-atomic age; neither creed nor color nor place of origin is relevant to the realities of modern power to utterly seek and destroy.
-- Sydney J. Harris
You may also like:
-
Albert Bushnell Hart
Historian -
Baltasar Gracian
Writer -
Barbara Grizzuti Harrison
Journalist -
Bernard Berenson
Art critic -
Bill Vaughan
Author -
E. Stanley Jones
Reporter -
Eduard Hanslick
Music critic -
Eric Hoffer
Philosopher -
Eyvind Johnson
Writer -
Fran Lebowitz
Author -
Gregory Harrison
Actor -
Ian Hart
Television actor -
James Weldon Johnson
Author -
Jean Anouilh
Dramatist -
Jim Harrison
Author -
Lara St. John
Violinist -
Patricia Neal
Actress -
Phillip E. Johnson
Law professor -
Sissela Bok
Philosopher -
Willa Cather
Author
