Sydney J. Harris

“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.”

“Self-discipline without talent can often achieve astounding results, whereas talent without self-discipline inevitably dooms itself to failure.”

“Usually, if we hate, it is the shadow of the person that we hate, rather than the substance. 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.”

“We have not passed that subtle line between childhood and adulthood until we move from the passive voice to the active voice — that is, until we have stopped saying “It got lost,” and say, “I lost it.”

“The principal difference between love and hate is that love is an irradiation, and hate is a concentration. Love makes everything lovely; hate concentrates itself on the object of its hatred. All the fearful counterfeits of love — possessiveness, lust, vanity, jealousy — are closer to hate: they concentrate on the object, guard it, suck it dry.”

“The beauty of “spacing” children many years apart lies in the fact that parents have time to learn the mistakes that were made with the older ones — which permits them to make exactly the opposite mistakes with the younger ones.”

“Regret for things we have done can be tempered by time, it is regret for things we have not done that is inconsolable.”

“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.”

“A cynic is not merely one who reads bitter lessons from the past; he is one who is prematurely disappointed in the future.”

“The generality of mankind is lazy. What distinguishes men of genuine achievement from the rest of us is not so much their intellectual powers and aptitudes as their curiosity, their energy, their fullest use of their potentialities. 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.”

“Never take life seriously. Nobody gets out alive anyway”

“If a small thing has the power to make you angry, does that not indicate something about your size?”

“Patriotism is proud of a country's virtues and eager to correct its deficiencies; it also acknowledges the legitimate patriotism of other countries, with their own specific virtues. The pride of nationalism, however, trumpets its country's virtues and denies its deficiencies, while it is contemptuous toward the virtues of other countries. It wants to be, and proclaims itself to be, "the greatest", but greatness is not required of a country; only goodness is.”

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

“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.”

“Our dilemma is that we hate change and love it at the same time; what we really want is for things to reamin the same but get better... ”

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

“A winner knows how much he still has to learn, even when he is considered an expert by others; a loser wants to be considered an expert by others before he has learned enough to know how little he knows.”

“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." --”

“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.”

“When I hear somebody sigh, 'Life is hard,' I am always tempted to ask, 'Compared to what?”

“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.”

“Happiness is a direction, not a place.”

“Regret for the things we did can be tempered by time; it is regret for the things we did not do that is inconsolable.”

“The time to relax is when you don't have time for it.”

“The whole purpose of education is to turn mirrors into windows.”