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.
SYDNEY J. HARRISIf you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem, but the perpetual human predicament is that the answer soon poses its own problems.
More Sydney J. Harris Quotes
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People who think they’re generous to a fault usually think that’s their only fault.
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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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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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When we have “second thoughts” about something, our first thoughts don’t seem like thoughts at all – just feelings.
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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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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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Why do most Americans look up to education and down upon educated people?
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If you cannot endure to be thought in the wrong, you will begin to do terrible things to make the wrong appear right.
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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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Any philosophy that can be put in a nutshell belongs there.
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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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The primary purpose of a liberal education is to make one’s mind a pleasant place in which to spend one’s leisure.
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Agnosticism is a perfectly respectable and tenable philosophical position; it is not dogmatic and makes no pronouncements about the ultimate truths of the universe. It remains open to evidence and persuasion; lacking faith, it nevertheless does not deride faith.
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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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Knowledge fills a large brain; it merely inflates a small one.
SYDNEY J. HARRIS