Nobody really knows how smart or talented he is until he finds the incentives to use himself to the fullest. God has given us more than we know what to do with.
SYDNEY J. HARRISSkepticism is not an end in itself; it is a tool for the discovery of truths.
More Sydney J. Harris Quotes
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Happiness is a direction, not a place.
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The whole purpose of education is to turn mirrors into windows.
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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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Skepticism is not an end in itself; it is a tool for the discovery of truths.
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Those who imagine that the world is against them have generally conspired to make it true.
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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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An idealist believes the short run doesn’t count. A cynic believes the long run doesn’t matter.
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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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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.
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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.
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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.
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The greatest enemy of progress is not stagnation, but false progress.
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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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A man will lay down his life for his friend but will not sacrifice his eardrums.
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It’s odd, and a little unsettling, to reflect upon the fact that English is the only major language in which “I” is capitalized; in many other languages “You” is capitalized and the “i” is lower case.” —
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Good teaching must be slow enough so that it is not confusing, and fast enough so that it is not boring.
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Man’s unique agony as a species consists in his perpetual conflict between the desire to stand out and the need to blend in.
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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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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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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 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.
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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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Never let your fears be the boundaries of your dreams. Happiness is a direction, not a place.
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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.
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The best thing you can give children, next to good habits, are good memories.
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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.
SYDNEY J. HARRIS