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. HARRISEvery rule in the book can be broken, except one – be who you are, and become all you were meant to be.
More Sydney J. Harris Quotes
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Ignorance per se is not nearly as dangerous as ignorance of ignorance.
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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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When I hear somebody sigh, ‘Life is hard,’ I am always tempted to ask, ‘Compared to what?’
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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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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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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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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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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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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.
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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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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.
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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 we have “second thoughts” about something, our first thoughts don’t seem like thoughts at all – just feelings.
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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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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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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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A man will lay down his life for his friend but will not sacrifice his eardrums.
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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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Real loneliness consists not in being alone, but in being with the wrong person, in the suffocating darkness of a room in which no deep communication is possible.
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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.
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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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The time to relax is when you don’t have time for it.
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If a small thing has the power to make you angry, does that not indicate something about your size?
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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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The whole purpose of education is to turn mirrors into windows.
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More trouble is caused in this world by indiscreet answers than by indiscreet questions.
SYDNEY J. HARRIS