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Many people feel “guilty” about things they shouldn’t feel guilty about, in order to shut out feelings of guilt about things they should feel guilty about.

Sydney J. Harris

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

Forgiveness Forgiving Loser
And to assert defensively at the outset that he is happily married, the father of four children and the one-time adornment of his college boxing, track and tennis teams.
SYDNEY J. HARRIS

Assert Children Defensively Terms Track
The main discomfort in being a middle-of-the-roader is that you get sideswiped by partisans going in both directions.
SYDNEY J. HARRIS

Discomfort Middle Partisan
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 pessimist sees only the tunnel; the optimist sees the light at the end of the tunnel; the realist sees the tunnel and the light – and the next tunnel.
SYDNEY J. HARRIS

Light Next Optimist Tunnels
It is not only useless, it is harmful, to believe in oneself until one truly knows oneself. And to know oneself means to accept our moments of insanity, of eccentricity, of childishness and blindness.
SYDNEY J. HARRIS

Believe Insanity Mean
By the time a man asks you for advice, he has generally made up his mind what he wants to do, and is looking for confirmation rather than counseling.
SYDNEY J. HARRIS

Advice Generally Men Mind
What is much harder to handle is the sense that you have to live up to the mark someone else has set for you. The grades become too important, the competition too frantic, the fear of disappointing those who believe in you turns into an overwhelming nightmare.
SYDNEY J. HARRIS

Believe Boys Parent
More trouble is caused in this world by indiscreet answers than by indiscreet questions.
SYDNEY J. HARRIS

Answers Trouble World
Good teaching must be slow enough so that it is not confusing, and fast enough so that it is not boring.
SYDNEY J. HARRIS

Confusing Teacher Teaching
Honesty consists of the unwillingness to lie to others; maturity, which is equally hard to attain, consists of the unwillingness to lie to oneself.
SYDNEY J. HARRIS

Attain Honesty Lying Maturity Truth
We may hate a person because he reminds us of someone we feared and disliked when younger; or because we see in him some gross caricature of what we find repugnant in ourself; or because he symbolizes an attitude that seems to threaten us.
SYDNEY J. HARRIS

Fear Ourselves Person Someone Younger
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
The loner may be respected, but he is always resented by his colleagues, for he seems to be passing a critical judgment on them, when he may be simply making a limiting statement about himself.
SYDNEY J. HARRIS

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

Children Memories Mom
Nobody really knows how smart or talented he is until he finds the incentives to use himself to the fullest. God has given us more than we know what to do with.
SYDNEY J. HARRIS

Commodity Nobody Precious Really Talented
Nobody can be so amusingly arrogant as a young man who has just discovered an old idea and thinks it is his own.
SYDNEY J. HARRIS

Ideas Men Thinking
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
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 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
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
People who think they’re generous to a fault usually think that’s their only fault.
SYDNEY J. HARRIS

Generosity People Thinking
Most of us go almost all the way through life as complete strangers to ourselves – so how can we know anyone else?
SYDNEY J. HARRIS

Anyone Else Most Stranger
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.
SYDNEY J. HARRIS

Children Independent
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.
SYDNEY J. HARRIS

Couple Couples Divorce Quarrel Separate
There are always too many Democratic congressmen, too many Republican congressmen, and never enough U.S. congressmen.
SYDNEY J. HARRIS

Democracy Republican Voting

Many people feel “guilty” about things they shouldn’t feel guilty about, in order to shut out feelings of guilt about things they should feel guilty about.

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Many people feel “guilty” about things they shouldn’t feel guilty about, in order to shut out feelings of guilt about things they should feel guilty about.

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Popular Authors

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