Sydney Harris Browse All Authors Top 18 quotes by Sydney Harris Any philosophy that can be put in a nutshell belongs there. Sydney Harris 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. Sydney Harris Our dilemma is that we hate change and love it at the same time -- what we really want is for things to remain the same but get better. Sydney Harris 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. Sydney Harris Regret for the things we did can be tempered by time it is regret for the things we did not do that is inconsolable. Sydney Harris 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 Harris 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. Sydney Harris As long as there are human beings, there will be the idea of brotherhood -- and an almost total inability to practice it. Sydney Harris Enemies, as well as lovers, come to resemble each other over a period of time. Sydney Harris If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the problem, but the perpetual human predicament is that the answer soon poses its own problems. Sydney Harris 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. Sydney Harris Maturity begins when you are content with knowing what you are saying is correct, rather than prove that someone else is wrong Sydney Harris Nobody can be so amusingly arrogant as a young man who has just discovered an old idea and thinks it is his own. Sydney Harris People far prefer happiness to wisdom, but that is like wanting to be immortal without getting older. Sydney Harris 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. Sydney Harris There's no point in burying the hatchet if you're going to put up a marker on the site. Sydney Harris 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.' Sydney Harris When I hear somebody sigh, 'Life is hard,' I am always tempted to ask, 'Compared to what' Sydney Harris
