Top 140 Sydney J. Harris Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “The commonest fallacy among women is that simply having children makes them a mother – which is as absurd as believing that having a piano makes one a musician.”

— Sydney J. Harris

52. “A winner rebukes and forgives; a loser is too Forgiveness breaks the chain of causality because he who forgives you – out of love – takes upon himself the consequences of what you have done. Forgiveness, therefore, always entails a sacrifice.”

— Sydney J. Harris

53. “Many a secret that cannot be pried out by curiosity can be drawn out by indifference.”

— Sydney J. Harris

54. “Why do so many people yearn for an eternal life when they don’t even know what to do with themselves in this brief one?”

— Sydney J. Harris

55. “Those who imagine that the world is against them have generally conspired to make it true.”

— Sydney J. Harris

56. “The profound immoralities of our time are cruelty, indifference, injustice and the use of others as means rather than ends in themselves.”

— Sydney J. Harris

57. “A cynic is not merely one who reads bitter lessons from the past, his is also one who is permanently disappointed in the future.”

— Sydney J. Harris

58. “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.”

— Sydney J. Harris

59. “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?”

— Sydney J. Harris

60. “Almost no one is foolish enough to imagine that he automatically deserves great success in any field of activity; yet almost everyone believes that he automatically deserves success in marriage.”

— Sydney J. Harris

61. “People who think they’re generous to a fault usually think that’s their only fault.”

— Sydney J. Harris

62. “Being yourself is not remaining where you are, or being satisfied with what you are. It is the point of departure.”

— Sydney J. Harris

63. “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.”

— Sydney J. Harris

64. “As WArden Lawes once said of convicts, no man can be called a failure until he has tried something he really likes, and fails at it.”

— Sydney J. Harris

65. “Sometimes the best, and only effective, way to kill an idea is to put it into practice.”

— Sydney J. Harris

66. “Skepticism is not an end in itself; it is a tool for the discovery of truths.”

— Sydney J. Harris

67. “The real danger is not that computers will begin to think like men, but that men will begin to think like computers.”

— Sydney J. Harris

68. “The best thing you can give children, next to good habits, are good memories.”

— Sydney J. Harris

69. “We must become masters of our own actions and attitudes. To let another person determine whether we will be rude or gracious, elated or depressed is to give control of ourselves. The only true possession is self possession.”

— Sydney J. Harris

70. “Confidence, once lost or betrayed, can never be restored again to the same measure; and we learn too late in life that our acts of deception are irrevocable – they may be forgiven, but they cannot be forgotten by their victims.”

— Sydney J. Harris

71. “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

72. “We can often endure an extra pound of pain far more easily than we can suffer the withdrawal of an ounce of accustomed pleasure.”

— Sydney J. Harris

73. “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

74. “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

75. “Nothing is as easy to make as a promise this winter to do something next summer; this is how commencement speakers are caught.”

— Sydney J. Harris

76. “Ignorance per se is not nearly as dangerous as ignorance of ignorance.”

— Sydney J. Harris

77. “Men make counterfeit money; in many more cases, money makes counterfeit men.”

— Sydney J. Harris

78. “When you run into someone who is disagreeable to others, you may be sure he is uncomfortable with himself; the amount of pain we inflict upon others is directly proportional to the amount we feel within us.”

— Sydney J. Harris

79. “When we have “second thoughts” about something, our first thoughts don’t seem like thoughts at all – just feelings.”

— Sydney J. Harris

80. “The principal difference between love and hate is that love is a irradiation, and hate is a concentration. Love makes everything lovely; hate concentrates itself on the object of its hatred.”

— Sydney J. Harris

81. “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

82. “But what is significant is that if you don’t want to like and accept somebody, one excuse is as good as another. The objective facts don’t matter, and the reasons are never as ‘reasonable’ as we like to think they are.”

— Sydney J. Harris

83. “People who won’t help others in trouble “because they got into trouble through their own fault” would probably not throw a lifeline to a drowning person until they learned whether that person fell in through his or her own fault or not.”

— Sydney J. Harris

84. “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

85. “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

86. “Between the semi-educated, who offer simplistic answers to complex questions, and the overeducated, who offer complicated answers to simple questions, it is a wonder that any questions get satisfactorily answered at all.”

— Sydney J. Harris

87. “Many persons of high intelligence have notoriously poor judgement.”

— Sydney J. Harris

88. “Almost every man looks more so in a belted trench coat.”

— Sydney J. Harris

89. “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

90. “There’s no point in burying a hatchet if you’re going to put up a marker on the site.”

— Sydney J. Harris

91. “Perseverance is the most overrated of traits, if it is unaccompanied by talent; beating your head against a wall is more likely to produce a concussion in the head than a hole in the wall.”

— Sydney J. Harris

92. “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

93. “We evaluate others with a Godlike justice, but we want them to evaluate us with a Godlike compassion.”

— Sydney J. Harris

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

— Sydney J. Harris

95. “Enemies, as well as lovers, come to resemble each other over a period of time.”

— Sydney J. Harris

96. “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

97. “The truest test of independent judgment is being able to dislike someone who admires us, and to admire someone who dislikes us.”

— Sydney J. Harris

98. “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

99. “It may be true that the weak will always be driven to the wall; but it is the task of a just society to see that the wall is climbable.”

— Sydney J. Harris

100. “The greatest educational dogma is also its greatest fallacy: the belief that what must be learned can necessarily be taught.”

— Sydney J. Harris