Sydney J. Harris Quotes

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.

And that is the beautiful thing about friendship: we can take liberties, we can show our frailer side, we can afford the vast luxury of giving way to our boredom when we are bored, our anger when we are angry, our peckishness when we feel downhearted.

"The three hardest tasks in the world are neither physical feats nor intellectual achievements, but moral acts: to return love for hate, to include the excluded, and to say, "I was wrong.

And our resistance against changing our habits of thought is immense and unrelenting. If we try, briefly, we find it ass vexing and unrewarding as writing a letter with the left hand. What we are used to is comfortable; what is comfortable is good; and what is good is right - this is the unspoken belief of almost all people everywhere. When a scientist, however, tackles a problem that has hitherto seemed insoluble, he abandons all his preconceptions, and all the preconceptions of the past. Only when he begins to question the basic assumptions he has always held can he make an utterly fresh start, unencumbered by the intellectual baggage of the past.

Superior people are only those who let it be discovered by others; the need to make it evident forfeits the very virtue they aspire to.

And the end of this paradox is that only when the child is thus free can he have the proper attachment to his parents; only when we allow his independence can he then freely offer us love and respect, without conflict and without resentment. It is the hardest lesson to learn that the goal of parenthood is not to reign forever but to abdicate gracefully at the right time.

"When a man says "I know what I mean, but I can't express it," he generally does not know what he means — for there can be no knowledge without words; there can only be feelings."

Everyone admits that "the truth hurts" but no one applies this adage to himself — and as soon as it begins to hurt us, we quickly repudiate it and call it a lie. It is this tendency toward self-deception (more than any active sin) that makes human progress slow and almost imperceptible.

Genuine love for a child, it seems to me, must include a desire for his maturity and ultimately his independence. WAtching a personality unfold is perhaps the deepest pleasure of parenthood; wishing, or trying, to retard this growth is one of the deepest sins.

Achieving the good life is more a matter of being than of doing or giving. It calls for intense self-scrutiny, a relentless honesty about one's motives, and a persistent feeling that we are no better — and perhaps worse — than those we are trying to help.

An idealist believes the short run doesn't count. A cynic believes the long run doesn't matter. A realist believes that what is done or left undone in the short run determines the long run.

A good talker is sensitive to expression, to tone and color and inflection in human speech. Because he himself is articulate, he can help others to articulate their half-formulated feelings. His mind fills in the gaps, and he becomes, in Socrates’ words, a kind of midwife for ideas that are struggling to be born.

A person who is going to commit an inhuman act invariably excuses himself to himself by saying, "I'm only human, after all."

The way in which we say something is often more important than what we say.

See him as the child he was.