Inspirational Quotations

Inspirational Quotes by Sydney J. Harris (American Essayist, Drama Critic)

Sydney J. Harris (1917–86) was an American syndicated essayist and drama critic for the Chicago Daily News and later Chicago Sun-Times. His weekday column, “Strictly Personal,” approached social and philosophical questions with a wry, humanist style.

Born in London, Harris’s family moved to the United States when he was five years old. He grew up in Chicago and spent the rest of his life there. After studying philosophy at the University of Chicago, he became a drama critic and a columnist for the Chicago Daily News in 1944. He held those positions until the paper ended in 1978 and then wrote for the Chicago Sun-Times until his death.

Harris’s “Strictly Personal” column was distributed to more than 200 American and Canadian newspapers by the Times of London syndicate. He used his background in philosophy and research to write about the contemporary world, human behavior, societal norms, faith, hypocrisy, and art in an intellectual, yet folksy style.

Collections of Harris’s columns were assembled into 11 books, including Strictly Personal (1953,) Majority of One (1957,) Pieces of Eight (1982,) and Clearing the Ground (1986.)

More: Wikipedia READ: Works by Sydney J. Harris

A general practitioner is a doctor who treats what you’ve got; a specialist is a doctor who finds you’ve got what he treats.
Sydney J. Harris

Sometimes the best, and only effective, way to kill an idea is to put it into practice.
Sydney J. Harris
Topics: Ideas

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
Topics: Argument, Arguments

A person who is going to commit an inhuman act invariably excuses himself to himself by saying, “I’m only human, after all.”
Sydney J. Harris

Men make counterfeit money; in many more cases, money makes counterfeit men.
Sydney J. Harris
Topics: Wealth, Being True to Yourself

Many a secret that cannot be pried out by curiosity can be drawn out by indifference.
Sydney J. Harris
Topics: Curiosity

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 J. Harris
Topics: Believe, Ideal, Ideals, Idealism

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
Topics: Pleasure

Agnosticism is a perfectly respectable and tenable philosophical position; it is not dogmatic and makes no pronouncements about the ultimate truths of the universe. It remains open to evidence and persuasion; lacking faith, it nevertheless does not deride faith. Atheism, on the other hand, is as unyielding and dogmatic about religious belief as true believers are about heathens. It tries to use reason to demolish a structure that is not built upon reason; because, though rational argument may take us to the edge of belief, we require a “leap of faith” to jump the chasm.
Sydney J. Harris

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
Topics: Identity

Many persons of high intelligence have notoriously poor judgement.
Sydney J. Harris
Topics: Decisions

Freud’s prescription for personal happiness as consisting of work and love must be taken with the proviso that the work has to be loved, and the love has to be worked at.
Sydney J. Harris

Self-discipline without talent can often achieve astounding results, whereas talent without self-discipline inevitably dooms itself to failure.
Sydney J. Harris

Maturity begins when we’re content to feel we’re right about something, without feeling the necessity to prove someone else is wrong.
Sydney J. Harris
Topics: Maturity

When I hear somebody sigh that “Life is hard,” I am always tempted to ask, “Compared to what?”
Sydney J. Harris
Topics: Perspective, Difficulty, Attitude

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 man until they learned whether he fell in through his own fault or not.
Sydney J. Harris
Topics: Service

Those with easy temperaments and weak characters are more likable than admirable; those with difficult temperaments and strong characters are more admirable than likable.
Sydney J. Harris

A winner rebukes and forgives; a loser is too timid to rebuke and too petty to forgive
Sydney J. Harris
Topics: Forgiveness

Just about the only interruption we don’t object to is applause.
Sydney J. Harris
Topics: Appreciation

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.
Sydney J. Harris

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
Topics: Persistence, Perseverance

Have you ever noticed that it is generally the same people who talk about the need for incentive to make a man work successfully, who resent the idea of incentive to make a man think successfully?
Sydney J. Harris
Topics: Work

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 J. Harris
Topics: Responsibility, Confidence, Maturity, Mistakes, Self-reliance, Failures

Good teaching must be slow enough so that it is not confusing, and fast enough so that it is not boring.
Sydney J. Harris
Topics: Teachers, Teaching

The time to relax is when you don’t have time for it.
Sydney J. Harris
Topics: Stress, Relaxation

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.
Sydney J. Harris

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
Topics: Advice

Nobody can be so amusingly arrogant as a young man who has just discovered an old idea and thinks it is his own.
Sydney J. Harris

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.
Sydney J. Harris

Once we assuage our conscience by calling something a necessary evil, it begins to look more and more necessary and less and less evil.
Sydney J. Harris
Topics: Conscience

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