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.
SYDNEY J. HARRISMany people know how to work hard; many others know how to play well; but the rarest talent in the world is the ability to introduce elements of playfulness into work, and to put some constructive labor into our leisure.
More Sydney J. Harris Quotes
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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.
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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.
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Marriages we regard as the happiest are those in which each of the partners believes he or she got the best of it.
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Why do most Americans look up to education and down upon educated people?
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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.
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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.
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Love makes everything lovely; hate concentrates itself on the object of its hatred.
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When I hear somebody sigh, ‘Life is hard,’ I am always tempted to ask, ‘Compared to what?’
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The truest test of independent judgment is being able to dislike someone who admires us, and to admire someone who dislikes us.
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The greatest educational dogma is also its greatest fallacy: the belief that what must be learned can necessarily be taught.
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Nobody can be so amusingly arrogant as a young man who has just discovered an old idea and thinks it is his own.
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Honesty consists of the unwillingness to lie to others; maturity, which is equally hard to attain, consists of the unwillingness to lie to oneself.
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Regret for the things we did can be tempered by time; it is regret for the things we did not do that is inconsolable.
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The main discomfort in being a middle-of-the-roader is that you get sideswiped by partisans going in both directions.
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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.
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We evaluate others with a Godlike justice, but we want them to evaluate us with a Godlike compassion.
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We have not passed that subtle line between childhood and adulthood until we have stopped saying ‘It got lost,’ and say, ‘I lost it.’
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Every rule in the book can be broken, except one – be who you are, and become all you were meant to be.
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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.
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An idealist believes the short run doesn’t count. A cynic believes the long run doesn’t matter.
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Men make counterfeit money; in many more cases, money makes counterfeit men.
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We can often endure an extra pound of pain far more easily than we can suffer the withdrawal of an ounce of accustomed pleasure.
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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.
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The art of living consists in knowing which impulses to obey and which must be made to obey.
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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.
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Take away grievances from some people and you remove their reasons for living; most of us are nourished by hope, but a considerable minority get psychic nutrition from their resentments, and would waste away purposelessly without them.
SYDNEY J. HARRIS