My Top 10 Quotes from Sidney J. Harris

1. A truly successful person knows how to overcome the past, use the present, and prepare for the future-but unless we can first surmount the past, we cannot effectively cope with either the present or the future.

2. The generality of mankind is lazy. What distinguishes men of genuine achievement from the rest of us is not so much their intellectual powers and aptitudes as their curiosity, their energy, their fullest use of their potentialities. Nobody really knows how smart or talented he is until he finds the incentives to use himself to the fullest. God has given us more than we know what to do with.

3. 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’.

4. A winner knows how much he still has to learn, even when he is considered an expert by others; a loser wants to be considered an expert by others before he has learned enough to know how little he knows.

5. Happiness is a direction, not a place.

6. A famously wise old man in a village was once asked how he came by his wisdom. “I got it from my good judgment,” he answered. And where did his good judgment come from? “I got it from my bad judgment.”

7. If you want to know what a man’s character is really like… ask him to tell you the living person he most admires – for hero worship is the truest index of a man’s private nature.

8. When I hear somebody sigh, ‘Life is hard,’ I am always tempted to ask, ‘Compared to what?’

9. A loser says that’s the way it’s always been done. A winner says there ought to be a better way.

10. The best thing you can give children, next to good habits, are good memories.