Sydney J. Harris Quotes - Page 5

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.

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.

Character is something you forge for yourself; temperament is something you are born with and can only slightly modify.

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." --

Any philosophy that can be put in a nutshell belongs there.

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.

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.

Why are we willing to accept a new mathematical formula we don't understand as the product of a brilliant mind, while rejecting a new art form we don't understand as the product of a deranged mind?

Ancient boundaries are meaningless, except for political purposes; old divisions of clan and tribe are sentimental remnants of the pre-atomic age; neither creed nor color nor place of origin is relevant to the realities of modern power to utterly seek and destroy.

Much as a teacher may wince at the thought, he is also an entertainer—for unless he can hold his audience, he cannot really instruct or edify them.

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

Man's unique agony as a species consists in his perpetual conflict between the desire to stand out and the need to blend in.

The reason that truth is stranger than fiction is that fiction has to have a rational thread running through it in order to be believable, whereas reality may be totally irrational.

Parents - and teachers too - are woefully short-sighted when they try to protect the child from his mistakes, when they make the "right answer" more important than the quest for knowledge and good judgment. For what is not learned within one's self cannot be learned from another.

It wants to be, and proclaims itself to be, 'the greatest', but greatness is not required of a country; only goodness is.

Those obsessed with health are not healthy; the first requisite of good health is a certain calculated carelessness about oneself.

The primary purpose of a liberal education is to make one's mind a pleasant place in which to spend one's leisure.

A person is either himself or not himself; is either rooted in his existence or is a fabrication; has either found his humanhood or is still playing with masks and roles and status symbols. 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.

The main discomfort in being a middle-of-the-roader is that you get sideswiped by partisans going in both directions.

All our efforts to attain immortality-by statesmanship, by conquest, by science or the arts-are equally vain in the long run, because the long run is longer than any of us can imagine.

Ignorance per se is not nearly as dangerous as ignorance of ignorance.

The world has always been betrayed by decent men with bad ideals.

More trouble is caused in this world by indiscreet answers than by indiscreet questions.

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.

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.