Top 100 Sydney Harris Quotes
#1. I was reminded of the Sydney Harris cartoon that said 'adding two numbers that have not been added before does not constitute a mathematical breakthrough'.
Ronald Graham
#2. Like all persecuted minority groups, they strike back by forming cabals, by "taking over" certain spheres of activity (in the arts, for instance), and by purposely provocative behavior.
Sydney J. Harris
#4. Many a secret that cannot be pried out by curiosity can be drawn out by indifference.
Sydney J. Harris
#5. History repeats itself, but in such cunning disguise that we never detect the resemblance until the damage is done.
Sydney J. Harris
#6. 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
#7. What the ordinary person means by a 'miracle' is some gross distortion or suspension of the laws of nature ... but life itself strikes him as commonplace, when in truth a blade of grass or a neuron in the brain is a greater miracle ...
Sydney J. Harris
#8. The most worthwhile form of education is the kind that puts the educator inside you, as it were, so that the appetite for learning persists long after the external pressure for grades and degrees has vanished. Otherwise you are not educated; you are merely trained.
Sydney J. Harris
#9. 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
J.L. Witterick
#10. 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
#11. The whole world is a gigantic legacy. Imagine having to start afresh each generation: who would invent the wheel, devise the lever, construct the alphabet and multiplication table? I could not; could you?
Sydney J. Harris
#12. Somebody once said that good conversation should be like a tennis match, with each player gracefully sending the ball back across the net; instead, most conversation is like a golf game, with each player stroking only his own ball, and waiting impatiently for the other to finish.
Sydney J. Harris
#13. It calls for deciding things on their own merit, not because you read it or were told it or grew up believing it.
Sydney J. Harris
#14. Much as a teacher may wince at the thought, he is also an entertainer - for unless he can hold his audience, he cannot really instruct or edify them.
Sydney J. Harris
#15. People decline invitations when they are "indisposed" physically, and I wish they would do likewise when they feel indisposed emotionally. A person has no more right to attend a party with a head full of venom than with a throat full of virus.
Sydney J. Harris
#16. The French may be straining the truth in their famous saying that "to understand all is to forgive all"," but it is certainly true that the more we know of any given person, the harder it becomes to hate him.
Sydney J. Harris
#17. A 'penchant for telling the truth' can cripple a candidates chances faster than being caught in flagrante delicto with the governor's wife.
Sydney J. Harris
#18. The lusts of the flesh can be gratified anywhere; it is not this sort of license that distinguishes New York. It is rather, a lust of the total ego for recognition, even for eminence. More than elsewhere, everybody here wants to be somebody.
Sydney J. Harris
#19. Good teaching must be slow enough so that it is not confusing, and fast enough so that it is not boring.
Sydney J. Harris
#20. We must also learn that time itself is indivisible, that every act is a blending of past experience, present situation and future expectancy.
Sydney J. Harris
#21. The severest test of character is not so much the ability to keep a secret as it is, when the secret is finally out, to refrain from disclosing that you knew it all along.
Sydney J. Harris
#22. When a man says "I know what I mean, but I can't express it," he generally does not know what he means - for there can be no knowledge without words; there can only be feelings.
Sydney J. Harris
#23. And that is the beautiful thing about friendship: we can take liberties, we can show our frailer side, we can afford the vast luxury of giving way to our boredom when we are bored, our anger when we are angry, our peckishness when we feel downhearted.
Sydney J. Harris
#24. Regret for things we have done can be tempered by time, it is regret for things we have not done that is inconsolable.
Sydney J. Harris
#25. 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
#26. All our efforts to attain immortality-by statesmanship, by conquest, by science or the arts-are equally vain in the long run, because the long run is longer than any of us can imagine.
Sydney J. Harris
#27. 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
#28. 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
#29. There are always too many Democratic congressmen, too many Republican congressmen, and never enough U.S. congressmen.
Sydney J. Harris
#30. Marriages we regard as the happiest are those in which each of the partners believes he or she got the best of it.
Sydney J. Harris
#31. 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
#32. If the devil could be persuaded to write a bible, he would title it, "You Only Live Once."
Sydney J. Harris
#33. The pessimist sees only the tunnel; the optimist sees the light at the end of the tunnel; the realist sees the tunnel and the light - and the next tunnel.
Sydney J. Harris
#34. The cynic is goodhearted beneath his facade, whereas the sentimentalist is flint-hearted beneath his.
Sydney J. Harris
#35. There is no point in burying the hatchet if you're going to put up a marker on the site.
Sydney Harris
#36. Character is something you forge for yourself; temperament is something you are born with and can only slightly modify.
Sydney J. Harris
#37. Nobody can misunderstand a child as much as his own parents.
Sydney J. Harris
#38. Filth is always a sign of weakness - in the mouth of the user and in the mind of the writer.
Sydney J. Harris
#39. Sincerity that thinks it is the sole possessor of the truth is a deadlier sin than hypocrisy, which knows better.
Sydney J. Harris
#40. 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 Harris
#41. Isolation always perverts; when a man lives only among his own sort, he soon begins to believe that his sort are the best sort. This attitude breeds both the arrogance of the conservative and the bitterness of the radical.
Sydney J. Harris
#42. People who won't help others in trouble "because they got into trouble through their own fault" would probably not throw a lifeline to a drowning person until they learned whether that person fell in through his or her own fault or not.
Sydney J. Harris
#43. Those obsessed with health are not healthy; the first requisite of good health is a certain calculated carelessness about oneself.
Sydney J. Harris
#45. No one should pay attention to a man delivering a lecture or a sermon on his "philosophy of life" until we know exactly how he treats his wife, his children, his neighbors, his friends, his subordinates and his enemies.
Sydney J. Harris
#46. A child owes respect to a parent, but there is no natural obligation to like a parent - unless the parent makes himself likable as a person.
Sydney J. Harris
#47. Somebody who never got over the embarrassing fact that he was born in bed with a lady.
Sydney J. Harris
#48. Real loneliness consists not in being alone, but in being with the wrong person, in the suffocating darkness of a room in which no deep communication is possible.
Sydney J. Harris
#49. Confidence, once lost or betrayed, can never be restored again to the same measure; and we learn too late in life that our acts of deception are irrevocable - they may be forgiven, but they cannot be forgotten by their victims.
Sydney J. Harris
#50. If you want to know what a man's character is really like ... ask him to tell you the living person he most admires - for hero worship is the truest index of a man's private nature.
Sydney J. Harris
#51. Patriotism is wanting what is best for your country. Nationalism is thinking your country is best, no matter what it does.
Sydney J. Harris
#52. The founder of every creed from Jesus Christ to Karl Marx, would be appalled to return to earth and see what has been made of that creed, not by its enemies, but by its most devoted adherents.
Sydney J. Harris
#53. At it's highest level, the purpose of teaching is not to teach - it is to inspire the desire for learning. Once a student's mind is set on fire, it will find a way to provide its own fuel.
Sydney J. Harris
#54. Many marriages falter, it seems to me, not because the couples are out of love, but because they have never been friends as much as lovers. They may love each other, in a vaporously romantic way, but they do not really like each other as individual personalities.
Sydney J. Harris
#55. Why do most Americans look up to education and down upon educated people?
Sydney J. Harris
#56. When a man's position in life depends upon his having a certain opinion, that's the opinion he will have.
Sydney J. Harris
#57. But the culture-vultures and the intellectual snobs, and the self-appointed guardians of the Muses, often frighten off the average person from the free development of this appetite.
Sydney J. Harris
#58. Western civilization has not yet learned the lesson that the energy we expend in 'getting things done' is less important than the moral strength it takes to decide what is worth doing and what is right to do.
Sydney J. Harris
#59. Achieving the good life is more a matter of being than of doing or giving. It calls for intense self-scrutiny, a relentless honesty about one's motives, and a persistent feeling that we are no better - and perhaps worse - than those we are trying to help.
Sydney J. Harris
#60. Any philosophy that can be put in a nutshell belongs there.
Sydney J. Harris
#61. Men make counterfeit money; in many more cases, money makes counterfeit men.
Sydney J. Harris
#62. If a small thing has the power to make you angry, does that not indicate something about your size?
Sydney J. Harris
#64. 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
#65. Law is order in liberty, and without order liberty is social chaos.
Sydney J. Harris
#66. Never take the advice of someone who has not had your kind of trouble.
Sydney J. Harris
#67. And most of the failures in parent-child relationships, from my observation, begin when the child begins to acquire a mind and a will of its own, to make independent decisions and to question the omnipotence or the wisdom of the parent.
Sydney J. Harris
#68. The truest test of independent judgment is being able to dislike someone who admires us, and to admire someone who dislikes us.
Sydney J. Harris
#69. It may be true that the weak will always be driven to the wall; but it is the task of a just society to see that the wall is climbable.
Sydney J. Harris
#70. We truly possess only what we are able to renounce; otherwise, we are simply possessed by our possessions.
Sydney J. Harris
#71. There is no such thing as an "atrocity" in warfare that is greater than the atrocity of warfare itself.
Sydney J. Harris
#72. It's odd that the people who worry whether certain plays are "morally offensive" so rarely worry about the moral offensiveness of war, poverty, bigotry.
Sydney J. Harris
#73. The art of living consists in knowing which impulses to obey and which must be made to obey.
Sydney J. Harris
#75. More trouble is caused in this world by indiscreet answers than by indiscreet questions.
Sydney J. Harris
#76. The greatest enemy of progress is not stagnation, but false progress.
Sydney J. Harris
#77. We believe what we want to believe, what we like to believe, what suits our prejudices and fuels our passions.
Sydney J. Harris
#78. 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
#79. By the time a man asks you for advice, he has generally made up his mind what he wants to do, and is looking for confirmation rather than counseling.
Sydney J. Harris
#80. Just about the only interruption we don't object to is applause.
Sydney J. Harris
#81. 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
#82. A loser says that's the way it's always been done. A winner says there ought to be a better way.
Sydney J. Harris
#83. Making out an invitation list for a party brings out the worst in everyone. It is then that our most ruthless estimates of the people we know come into play.
Sydney J. Harris
#84. You may be sure that when a man begins to call himself a realist he is preparing to do something that he is secretly ashamed of doing.
Sydney J. Harris
#85. The people who are suspicious of certain things are the very ones who are the most capable of doing that of which they are suspicious.
Sydney J. Harris
#86. The man is really looking for self-esteem, and he seeks to find it by winning the esteem of others. In our society, the fastest and surest way to do this is by amassing a great deal of money. So the money becomes a substitute, a symbol, for the esteem.
Sydney J. Harris
#87. Life is, if anything, the art of combination. Of discrimination. Of freely picking one's own personal pattern out of a hundred choices. Not letting it be picked for you - either by the Establishment, or by the Rebels. Conformity of Hip is no better than Conformity of Square.
Sydney J. Harris
#88. Genealogy: A perverse preoccupation of those who seek to demonstrate that their forebears were better people than they are.
Sydney J. Harris
#89. 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
#90. But in terms of "psychological" time, most of us are still living in centuries past, stirred by ancient grudges, controlled by obsolete prejudices, driven by buried fears.
Sydney J. Harris
#91. Yet, advice on what we can do is usually futile - for we will do nothing except applaud the speaker, accept those ideas of his we already agree with, and reject those ideas that run counter to our prejudices.
Sydney J. Harris
#92. The paradox of friendship is that it is both the strongest thing in the world and the most fragile. Wild horses cannot separate friends, but whining words can. A man will lay down his life for his friend but will not sacrifice his eardrums.
Sydney J. Harris
#93. The way in which we say something is often more important than what we say.
Sydney J. Harris
#94. The main discomfort in being a middle-of-the-roader is that you get sideswiped by partisans going in both directions.
Sydney J. Harris
#95. An idealist believes that the short run doesn't count. A cynic believes the long run doesn't matter. A realist believes that what is done or left undone in the short run determines the long run. - Sydney J. Harris
David Allen
#96. Self-discipline without talent can often achieve astounding results, whereas talent without self-discipline inevitably dooms itself to failure.
Sydney J. Harris
#97. Middle Age is that perplexing time of life when we hear two voices calling us, one saying, 'Why not?' and the other, 'Why bother?'
Sydney J. Harris
#98. A famously wise old man in a village was once asked how he came by his wisdom. "I got it from my good judgment," he answered. And where did his good judgment come from? "I got it from my bad judgment."
Sydney J. Harris
#99. Just as communism always begins with an appeal to "humanity" and equality" and ends with inhuman despotism, so does fascism always begin with an appeal to "nationalism" and "individualism," and ends with a military collectivism far worse than the disease it purports to cure.
Sydney J. Harris
#100. Ninety per cent of the world's woe comes from people not knowing themselves, their abilities, their frailties, and even their real virtues. Most of us go almost all the way through life as complete strangers to ourselves
so how can we know anyone else?
Sydney J. Harris
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
