Sydney J. Harris

Ranking: 124th
Biography of Sydney J. Harris
Search Sydney J. Harris's quotes


Quote	Categories	Rating	Rate
"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.'"	Miscellaneous
"Any philosophy that can be put in a nutshell belongs there."	Miscellaneous
"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."	Accomplishment, Achievement, Goals
"There's no point in burying the hatchet if you're going to put up a marker on the site."	Miscellaneous
"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."	Lies
"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."	Ability, Life, Men
"When I hear somebody sigh, Life is hard, I am always tempted to ask, Compared to what?"	Life
"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."	Art, Men
"Enemies, as well as lovers, come to resemble each other over a period of time."	Love, Time
"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."	Change, Desires, Love
"People far prefer happiness to wisdom, but that is like wanting to be immortal without getting older."	Age, Desires, Happiness
"Nobody can be so amusingly arrogant as a young man who has just discovered an old idea and thinks it is his own."	Age, Men, Pride
"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."	Age, Art, Beauty
"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."	Age, Excellence, Imagination
"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."	Ability, Anger, Honesty
"As long as there are human beings, there will be the idea of brotherhood -- and an almost total inability to practice it."	Ability, Men

Browse Sydney J. Harris quotes by category:

Ability	Accomplishment	Achievement
Age	Anger	Art
Beauty	Change	Desires
Excellence	Goals	Happiness
Honesty	Imagination	Intelligence
Joy	Knowledge	Learning
Lies	Life	Love
Men	Military	Miscellaneous
Mistakes	Pride	Reading
Sin	Success	Time
Truth	Wants	War
Wisdom