243 Quotes by Sydney J. Harris

Many married couples separate because they quarrel incessantly, but just as many separate because they were never honest enough or courageous enough to quarrel when they should have.

Nothing is as easy to make as a promise this winter to do something next summer; this is how commencement speakers are caught.

Man's unique agony as a species consists in his perpetual conflict between the desire to stand out and the need to blend in.

Ninety per cent of the world's woe comes from people not knowing themselves, their abilities, their frailties, and even their real virtues. Most of us go almost all the way through life as complete strangers to ourselves - so how can we know anyone else?

Those obsessed with health are not healthy; the first requisite of good health is a certain calculated carelessness about oneself.

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

Parents - and teachers too - are woefully short-sighted when they try to protect the child from his mistakes, when they make the "right answer" more important than the quest for knowledge and good judgment. For what is not learned within one's self cannot be learned from another.

There's no point in burying a hatchet if you're going to put up a marker on the site.

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 person until they learned whether that person fell in through his or her own fault or not.