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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

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Sydney J. Harris
Age: 69 †
Born: 1917
Born: September 14
Died: 1986
Died: December 8
Journalist
London
England
Sydney Harris
Wall
Overrated
Talent
Beating
Head
Traits
Hole
Perseverance
Holes
Unaccompanied
Likely
Concussion
Produce
Concussions

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The primary purpose of a liberal education is to make one's mind a pleasant place in which to spend one's leisure.
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A winner rebukes and forgives a loser is too timid to rebuke and too petty to forgive.
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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'.
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All our efforts to attain immortality-by statesmanship, by conquest, by science or the arts-are equally vain in the long run, because the long run is longer than any of us can imagine.
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American parents, on the whole, do not want their sons to be artisans or craftsmen, but business or professional people. As a result, millions of youngsters are being prepared for careers they have little aptitude for - and little interest in except for dubious prestige.
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We evaluate others with a Godlike justice, but we want them to evaluate us with a Godlike compassion.
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Maturity begins when we're content to feel we're right about something without feeling the necessity to prove someone else wrong.
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There is no such thing as an atrocity in warfare that is greater than the atrocity of warfare itself.
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The truest test of independent judgment is being able to dislike someone who admires us, and to admire someone who dislikes us.
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Confidence, once lost or betrayed, can never be restored again to the same measure and we learn too late in life that our acts of deception are irrevocable - they may be forgiven, but they cannot be forgotten by their victims.
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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.
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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.
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Norbert Blei is a writer the way people used to be troubadours and minstrels, celebrating what he has seen and heart and felt in a deceptively simple style reminiscent of the early Sherwood Anderson. . . . Like Anderson, he is a lover, and his affection invests his writing with a singular charm.
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When you run into someone who is disagreeable to others, you may be sure he is uncomfortable with himself the amount of pain we inflict upon others is directly proportional to the amount we feel within us.
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It is not only useless, it is harmful, to believe in oneself until one truly knows oneself. And to know oneself means to accept our moments of insanity, of eccentricity, of childishness and blindness.
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When we inform, we lead from strength when we communicate, we lead from weakness—and it is precisely this confession of mortality that engages the ears, heads and hearts of those we want to enlist as allies in a common cause.
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Regret for the things we did can be tempered by time it is regret for the things we did not do that is inconsolable.
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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.
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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.
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Why do so many people yearn for an eternal life when they don't even know what to do with themselves in this brief one?
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