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. HARRISAll significant achievement comes from daring from experiment from the willingness to risk failure.
More Sydney J. Harris Quotes
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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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Elitism is the slur directed at merit by mediocrity.
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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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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.
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A loser says that’s the way it’s always been done. A winner says there ought to be a better way.
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Almost every man looks more so in a belted trench coat.
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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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Never let your fears be the boundaries of your dreams. Happiness is a direction, not a place.
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There’s no point in burying a hatchet if you’re going to put up a marker on the site.
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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.
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Knowledge fills a large brain; it merely inflates a small one.
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When we have “second thoughts” about something, our first thoughts don’t seem like thoughts at all – just feelings.
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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.
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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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The whole purpose of education is to turn mirrors into windows.
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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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When I hear somebody sigh, ‘Life is hard,’ I am always tempted to ask, ‘Compared to what?’
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Any philosophy that can be put in a nutshell belongs there.
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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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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.
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Nothing is as easy to make as a promise this winter to do something next summer; this is how commencement speakers are caught.
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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.
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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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A cynic is not merely one who reads bitter lessons from the past, his is also one who is permanently disappointed in the future.
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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.
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When we inform, we lead from strength; when we communicate, we lead from weakness-and it is precisely this confession of mortality that engages the ears, heads and hearts of those we want to enlist as allies in a common cause.
SYDNEY J. HARRIS