Sydney J. Harris

And marriage, generally, requires an exquisite sense of timing. As a single person, time is relative to one’s needs and demands; as a married partner, time is a joint venture - the husband may be an hour late getting home, while dinner grows cold; the wife may be an hour late dressing for a party, while her mate grows hot under the collar. Time does not belong to us alone; we share it with those we love, those we work for, those we play with. It is an elastic concept: we must, as we grow older, be willing to be bored for someone else’s sake. And it can be as fatal to be stingy with our time as with our money.

As WArden Lawes once said of convicts, no man can be called a failure until he has tried something he really likes, and fails at it.

Like all persecuted minority groups, they strike back by forming cabals, by “taking over” certain spheres of activity (in the arts, for instance), and by purposely provocative behavior.

For most people read not with their minds, but with their emotions and prejudices. They read into or read out of a piece of writing what they want to. And when they disagree, it is usually not with what the writer says, but with what they imagine he said... People filter what they read through the fine strainer of their feelings and preconceptions, their prejudices and fears.

"I am convinced that an immense number of people who have children should not have them, and do not particularly want them, except as "symbols" of family life. What they want are ideal children, not real ones; and as soon as the real ones show no intention of conforming to the ideal in the parent's mind, they are treated as burdens, shipped away to school or otherwise neglected."

As Bernard Shaw said, “He who can, does: he who cannot, teaches.” But, as Sydney J. Harris put it, “Let’s revise Shaw’s foolish saying to ‘He who can, does; he who understands, teaches.

The principal difference between love and hate is that love is an irradiation, and hate is a concentration. Love makes everything lovely; hate concentrates itself on the object of its hatred. All the fearful counterfeits of love — possessiveness, lust, vanity, jealousy — are closer to hate: they concentrate on the object, guard it, suck it dry.

We must also learn that time itself is indivisible, that every act is a blending of past experience, present situation and future expectancy.

"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.

...when the createdness of the other person is not viewed as necessary as our own — then there is no reason (beyond expediency) to treat the other as a person. All injustice and cruelty come, basically, from this distorted view of reality.

And most of the failures in parent-child relationships, from my observation, begin when the child begins to acquire a mind and a will of its own, to make independent decisions and to question the omnipotence or the wisdom of the parent.

Many marriages falter, it seems to me, not because the couples are out of love, but because they have never been friends as much as lovers. They may love each other, in a vaporously romantic way, but they do not really like each other as individual personalities.

But what is significant is that if you don’t want to like and accept somebody, one excuse is as good as another. The objective facts don’t matter, and the reasons are never as ‘reasonable’ as we like to think they are.

Ninety percent of what we believe has nothing to do with the process of thought, but comes instead from the four sources of family inheritance, individual temperament, national culture, and economic self-interest; and while we cannot wholly cast off these shackles, we should at least recognize their cramping and distorting influence upon the free process of thought.

Our dilemma is that we hate change and love it at the same time; what we really want is for things to reamin the same but get better...