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. HARRISIf you cannot endure to be thought in the wrong, you will begin to do terrible things to make the wrong appear right.
More Sydney J. Harris Quotes
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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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Intolerance is the most socially acceptable form of egotism, for it permits us to assume superiority without personal boasting.
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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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This is a lesson mankind has not yet learned. We identify, and stratify, and treat persons largely on the basis of their accidental (physical) characteristics, which have no deeper meaning.
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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.
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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 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 best combination of parents consists of a father who is gentle beneath his firmness, and a mother who is firm beneath her gentleness.
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Every morning I take out my bankbook, stare at it, shudder – and turn quickly to my typewriter.
SYDNEY J. HARRIS -
Almost every man looks more so in a belted trench coat.
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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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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.
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Any philosophy that can be put in a nutshell belongs there.
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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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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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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 university is not, primarily, a place in which to learn how to make a living; it is a place in which to learn how to be more fully a human being, how to draw upon one’s resources, how to discipline the mind and expand the imagination; how to make some sense out of the big world we will shortly be thrown into.
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Love makes everything lovely; hate concentrates itself on the object of its hatred.
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A winner rebukes and forgives; a loser is too timid to rebuke and too petty to forgive.
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Middle Age is that perplexing time of life when we hear two voices calling us, one saying, ‘Why not?’ and the other, ‘Why bother?’
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A ‘penchant for telling the truth’ can cripple a candidates chances faster than being caught in flagrante delicto with the governor’s wife.
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The time to relax is when you don’t have time for it.
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The greatest enemy of progress is not stagnation, but false progress.
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Those who imagine that the world is against them have generally conspired to make it true.
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Many 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.
SYDNEY J. HARRIS