Sydney J. Harris

Never let your fears be the boundaries of your dreams._x000D_ _x000D_ Happiness is a direction, not a place.

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

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.

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

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.

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

Happiness is a direction, not a place.

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.

It wants to be, and proclaims itself to be, 'the greatest', but greatness is not required of a country; only goodness is.

Skepticism is not an end in itself; it is a tool for the discovery of truths.

The greatest enemy of progress is not stagnation, but false progress.

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.