Top 167 Quotes & Sayings by Sydney J. Harris - Page 3

More trouble is caused in this world by indiscreet answers than by indiscreet questions.

Happiness held is the seed; happiness shared is the flower. A truly happy person is one who can enjoy the scenery while on a detour. Happiness is a direction, not a place.

Being yourself is not remaining what you were, or being satisfied with what you are. It is the point of departure and far from the goal.

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.

The loner may be respected, but he is always resented by his colleagues, for he seems to be passing a critical judgment on them, when he may be simply making a limiting statement about himself.

Norbert Blei is a writer the way people used to be troubadours and minstrels, celebrating what he has seen and heart and felt in a deceptively simple style reminiscent of the early Sherwood Anderson. . . . Like Anderson, he is a lover, and his affection invests his writing with a singular charm.

Genealogy: A perverse preoccupation of those who seek to demonstrate that their forebears were better people than they are.

Filth is always a sign of weakness - in the mouth of the user and in the mind of the writer.

All significant achievement comes from daring from experiment from the willingness to risk failure.

As long as there are human beings, there will be the idea of brotherhood -- and an almost total inability to practice it.

Between the semi-educated, who offer simplistic answers to complex questions, and the overeducated, who offer complicated answers to simple questions, it is a wonder that any questions get satisfactorily answered at all.

Nice things are done for our own sake, not for the sake of others. The pleasure must reside in the performance, not in the applause. Good deeds are, in a deeper psychological way, a favor to oneself. If this is not grasped, then our whole sense of personal relationships becomes warped.

Every morning I take out my bankbook, stare at it, shudder - and turn quickly to my typewriter.

Law is order in liberty, and without order liberty is social chaos.

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.

The main discomfort in being a middle-of-the-roader is that you get sideswiped by partisans going in both directions.

A person is either himself or not himself; is either rooted in his existence or is a fabrication; has either found his humanhood or is still playing with masks and roles and status symbols. And nobody is more aware of this difference (although unconsciously) than a child. Only an authentic person can evoke a good response in the core of the other person; only person is resonant to person.

Many people feel "guilty" about things they shouldn't feel guilty about, in order to shut out feelings of guilt about things they should feel guilty about.

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.

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.

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.

Agnosticism is a perfectly respectable and tenable philosophical position; it is not dogmatic and makes no pronouncements about the ultimate truths of the universe. It remains open to evidence and persuasion; lacking faith, it nevertheless does not deride faith. Atheism, on the other hand, is as unyielding and dogmatic about religious belief as true believers are about heathens. It tries to use reason to demolish a structure that is not built upon reason.

Usually, if we hate, it is the shadow of the person that we hate, rather than the substance. We may hate a person because he reminds us of someone we feared and disliked when younger; or because we see in him some gross caricature of what we find repugnant in ourself; or because he symbolizes an attitude that seems to threaten us.

Nuclear war is inevitable, says the pessimists; Nuclear war is impossible, says the optimists; Nuclear war is inevitable unless we make it impossible, says the realists.

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.

It is not only useless, it is harmful, to believe in oneself until one truly knows oneself. And to know oneself means to accept our moments of insanity, of eccentricity, of childishness and blindness.

Sincerity that thinks it is the sole possessor of the truth is a deadlier sin than hypocrisy, which knows better.

The public examination of homosexuality in our contemporary life is still so coated with distasteful moral connotations that even a reviewer is bound to wonder uneasily why he was selected to evaluate a book on the subject, and to assert defensively at the outset that he is happily married, the father of four children and the one-time adornment of his college boxing, track and tennis teams.

If the devil could be persuaded to write a bible, he would title it, "You Only Live Once."

When we have "second thoughts" about something, our first thoughts don't seem like thoughts at all - just feelings.

Almost every man looks more so in a belted trench coat.

Man's unique agony as a species consists in his perpetual conflict between the desire to stand out and the need to blend in.

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.

Nobody can misunderstand a child as much as his own parents.

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.

But what is significant is that if you don't want to like and accept somebody, one excuse is as good as another. The objective facts don't matter, and the reasons are never as ‘reasonable' as we like to think they are.

God cannot be solemn, or he would not have blessed man with the incalculable gift of laughter.

Many persons of high intelligence have notoriously poor judgement.

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.

A winner rebukes and forgives; a loser is too Forgiveness breaks the chain of causality because he who forgives you -- out of love -- takes upon himself the consequences of what you have done. Forgiveness, therefore, always entails a sacrifice.

Christianity is not a "spiritual" religion, like some religions of the east. It is an intensely "practical" religion, having its moral roots in the practicality of judaism. It was not designed to change the way men think or believe as much as to change the way they act.

Gourmet: Usually little more than a glutton festooned with credit cards.

A 'penchant for telling the truth' can cripple a candidates chances faster than being caught in flagrante delicto with the governor's wife.

The principal difference between love and hate is that love is a irradiation, and hate is a concentration. Love makes everything lovely; hate concentrates itself on the object of its hatred.

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.

What is much harder to handle is the sense that you have to live up to the mark someone else has set for you. The grades become too important, the competition too frantic, the fear of disappointing those who believe in you turns into an overwhelming nightmare.

Just about the only interruption we don't object to is applause.