Sydney J. Harris Quotes

There's a difference between a philosophy and a bumper sticker.

What is grand is necessarily obscure to weak men. That which can be made explicit to the idiot is not worth my care.

I hate bumper stickers, you can't sum anything up. All you do is paint yourself in some caricaturist corner.

Truth is something which can't be told in a few words. Those who simplify the universe only reduce the expansion of its meaning.

I speak as simply as possible because the issue is too great to be obscured by eloquence.

Anything that can be put in a nut shell should remain there.

You can cram a truth into an epigram - the truth, never.

Not that the story need be long, but it will take a long while to make it short.

To condense fact from the vapor of nuance.

Simplicity is the outward sign and symbol of depth of thought.

People are always trying to draw simplistic dialectics that can capture things.

My stories are very compact. I want them to say the most complex things in the simplest way.

The water in a vessel is sparkling; the water in the sea is dark. The small truth has words which are clear; the great truth has great silence.

I don't believe songs that try to say everything in a simple slogan.

We endeavor to stuff the universe into the gullet of an aphorism.

If somebody writes clearly, you can pretty much tell immediately if something is shallow or deep, whereas if they write with all this duckweed on the surface, you can't tell if the stream is one inch deep or a hundred fathoms.

In labouring to be concise, I become obscure.

Easy reading is damn hard writing.

It is when I struggle to be brief that I become obscure.

I'm an enemy of exposition. I feel there's no need to overstate.

Philosophy is for the few.

To be a fashion critic is easy because you just say, 'I love it, I hate it,' but life is more than love and hate.

Everything deep is also simple and can be reproduced simply as long as its reference to the whole truth is maintained. But what matters is not what is witty but what is true.

Our society has lost its taste for complexity and nuance…. We want simple answers …. We have almost disabled our politicians from speaking.

People tend to simplify things.