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A winner rebukes and forgives; a loser is too timid to rebuke and too petty to forgive.

Sydney J. Harris

The best thing you can give children, next to good habits, are good memories.
SYDNEY J. HARRIS

Children Memories Mom
If you cannot endure to be thought in the wrong, you will begin to do terrible things to make the wrong appear right.
SYDNEY J. HARRIS

Acceptance Endure Terrible
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.
SYDNEY J. HARRIS

Hands Philosophical Religious
We have not passed that subtle line between childhood and adulthood until we have stopped saying ‘It got lost,’ and say, ‘I lost it.’
SYDNEY J. HARRIS

Education Parenting Responsibility
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.
SYDNEY J. HARRIS

Art Choices Squares
The art of living consists in knowing which impulses to obey and which must be made to obey.
SYDNEY J. HARRIS

Art Knowing Made
If 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.
SYDNEY J. HARRIS

Answers Predicaments Problem
The primary purpose of a liberal education is to make one’s mind a pleasant place in which to spend one’s leisure.
SYDNEY J. HARRIS

College Education Mind
Middle Age is that perplexing time of life when we hear two voices calling us, one saying, ‘Why not?’ and the other, ‘Why bother?’
SYDNEY J. HARRIS

Bother Funny Two Witty
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.
SYDNEY J. HARRIS

Children Men Philosophy
Intolerance is the most socially acceptable form of egotism, for it permits us to assume superiority without personal boasting.
SYDNEY J. HARRIS

Acceptance Assuming Tolerance
It’s surprising how many persons go through life without ever recognizing that their feelings toward other people are largely determined by their feelings toward themselves, and if you’re not comfortable within yourself, you can’t be comfortable with others.
SYDNEY J. HARRIS

Confidence Relationship Self Esteem
Skepticism is not an end in itself; it is a tool for the discovery of truths.
SYDNEY J. HARRIS

Discovery Tools Truth
When I hear somebody sigh, ‘Life is hard,’ I am always tempted to ask, ‘Compared to what?’
SYDNEY J. HARRIS

Funny Inspirational Life
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.
SYDNEY J. HARRIS

Belief Dogmatic Reason Structure
Man’s unique agony as a species consists in his perpetual conflict between the desire to stand out and the need to blend in.
SYDNEY J. HARRIS

Men Unique War
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.
SYDNEY J. HARRIS

Appreciation Loss Swing
The founder of every creed from Jesus Christ to Karl Marx, would be appalled to return to earth and see what has been made of that creed, not by its enemies, but by its most devoted adherents.
SYDNEY J. HARRIS

Appalled Christ Enemy Jesus
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.
SYDNEY J. HARRIS

Imposed Party People Physically Wish
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. HARRIS

Discipline Learning Life
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. HARRIS

Estimated Party People Play Worst
Any philosophy that can be put in a nutshell belongs there.
SYDNEY J. HARRIS

Discovery Ethics Philosophy
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.
SYDNEY J. HARRIS

Communication Loneliness Real
The greatest educational dogma is also its greatest fallacy: the belief that what must be learned can necessarily be taught.
SYDNEY J. HARRIS

Creative Educational Taught
Those who imagine that the world is against them have generally conspired to make it true.
SYDNEY J. HARRIS

Imagination Imagine World
We truly possess only what we are able to renounce; otherwise, we are simply possessed by our possessions.
SYDNEY J. HARRIS

Able Possession Renounce
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. HARRIS

Minorities People Psychics

A winner rebukes and forgives; a loser is too timid to rebuke and too petty to forgive.

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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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