People who think they’re generous to a fault usually think that’s their only fault.
SYDNEY J. HARRISOur 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.
More Sydney J. Harris Quotes
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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 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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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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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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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.
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A loser says that’s the way it’s always been done. A winner says there ought to be a better way.
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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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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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The greatest educational dogma is also its greatest fallacy: the belief that what must be learned can necessarily be taught.
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Any philosophy that can be put in a nutshell belongs there.
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Elitism is the slur directed at merit by mediocrity.
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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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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.
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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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Patriotism is proud of a country’s virtues and eager to correct its deficiencies; it also acknowledges the legitimate patriotism of other countries, with their own specific virtues.
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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.
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Nobody can be so amusingly arrogant as a young man who has just discovered an old idea and thinks it is his own.
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Many married couples separate because they quarrel incessantly, but just as many separate because they were never honest enough or courageous enough to quarrel when they should have.
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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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A man will lay down his life for his friend but will not sacrifice his eardrums.
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The art of living consists in knowing which impulses to obey and which must be made to obey.
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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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Almost every man looks more so in a belted trench coat.
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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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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