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The severest test of character is not so much the ability to keep a secret as it is, when the secret is finally out, to refrain from disclosing that you knew it all along.

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
Knew
Secret
Disclosing
Ability
Severest
Keep
Refrain
Character
Test
Much
Tests
Finally
Along

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Sometimes the best, and only effective, way to kill an idea is to put it into practice.
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There's no point in burying a hatchet if you're going to put up a marker on the site.
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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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Those obsessed with health are not healthy the first requisite of good health is a certain calculated carelessness about oneself.
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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.
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Western civilization has not yet learned the lesson that the energy we expend in 'getting things done' is less important than the moral strength it takes to decide what is worth doing and what is right to do.
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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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Once we assuage our conscience by calling something a necessary evil, it begins to look more and more necessary and less and less evil.
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Genealogy: A perverse preoccupation of those who seek to demonstrate that their forebears were better people than they are.
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We have not passed that subtle line between childhood and adulthood until we have stopped saying 'It got lost,' and say, 'I lost it.'
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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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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.
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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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Self-discipline without talent can often achieve astounding results, whereas talent without self-discipline inevitably dooms itself to failure.
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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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Christianity is not a spiritual religion, like some religions of the east. It is an intensely practical religion, having its moral roots in the practicality of judaism. It was not designed to change the way men think or believe as much as to change the way they act.
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Any philosophy that can be put in a nutshell belongs there.
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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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Being yourself is not remaining what you were, or being satisfied with what you are. It is the point of departure and far from the goal.
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The difference between faith and superstition is that the first uses reason to go as far as it can, and then makes the jump the second shuns reason entirely — which is why superstition is not the ally, but the enemy, of true religion.
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