Sydney J. Harris Quotes
Death can be a lesser evil Last night I met a young man who has just spent two years of his life lying flat on his back in a hospital bed.
Middle Age is that perplexing time of life when we hear two voices calling us, one saying, "Why not?" and the other, "Why bother?"
Ignorance per se is not nearly as dangerous as ignorance of ignorance.
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.
Most people today fail to recognize that happiness is a fairly recent aspiration of the human race. For most of history, survival was the goal.
Character is something you forge for yourself; temperament is something you are born with and can only slightly modify.
The difference between patriotism and nationalism is that the patriot is proud of his country for what it does, and the nationalist is proud of his country no matter what it does; the first attitude creates a feeling of responsibility, but the second a feeling of blind arrogance that leads to war.
It is certain that nothing we have brings us happiness, but only what we are, what we feel about ourselves.
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.
The most worthwhile form of education is the kind that puts the educator inside you, as it were, so that the appetite for learning persists long after the external pressure for grades and degrees has vanished. Otherwise you are not educated; you are merely trained.
Nobody can be so amusingly arrogant as a young man who has just discovered an old idea and thinks it is his own.
That the familiar phrase "the pursuit of happiness" should be reversed to read "the happiness of pursuit," for there is more pleasure to be found in the quest than in the goal.
Work and play are an artificial pair of opposites, because the best kind of play contains an element of work, and the most productive kind of work must include something of the spirit of play.
Nothing is as easy to make as a promise this winter to do something next summer; this is how commencement speakers are caught.
