Sydney J. Harris Quotes

As the saying goes, truth is stranger than fiction. But only when the reality has not been subsumed by foamy legends and fantasies that radiate outward from the actual event.

The hardest thing to remember is that what we each really want is the truth of our lives, good or bad. Not rocking the boat is an illusion that can only be maintained by the unspoken agreement not to feel and in the long run it never really works. Let go of saving the boat and save the passengers instead.

Nature...cannot be fooled!

The longer I live the more I mistrust theatricality, the false glamour cast by performance, the more I know its poverty beside the truths we are salvaging from the splitting-open of our lives. -from "Transcendental Etude

It was better to know the worst than to wonder.

Sincerity means that the appearance and the reality are exactly the same.

You will find that the truth is often unpopular and the contest between agreeable fancy and disagreeable fact is unequal. For, in the vernacular, we Americans are suckers for good news.

None but the dead are permitted to tell the truth.

Who's afraid of Virginia Woolf means who's afraid of the big bad wolf ... who's afraid of living life without false illusions.

The truth is undeniable. You tell somebody the truth, it's undeniable.

That's the problem with truth. The truth is relentless. It won't leave you alone. It keeps creeping up on you from every side, showing you what's really so. That can he annoying.

Even if all parts of a problem seem to fit together like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, one has to remember that the probable need not necessarily be the truth and the truth not always probable.

Let things taste of what they are.

The love is real in any situation; everything else is just an illusion.

We are all afraid of the truth.

With death comes honesty.

We pass for what we are.

Truth carries with it confrontation.

affectation is fond of making a greater show than reality. ... Nature and truth have never learned to blow the trumpet, and never will.

Nothing really succeeds which is not based on reality; sham, in a large sense, is never successful. In the life of the individual, as in the more comprehensive life of the State, pretension is nothing and power is everything.

I have thought it my duty to exhibit things as they are, not as they ought to be.

Dignity is often a veil between us and the real truth of things.

We ultimately have to find truth in the material, and I think that transfers onto the screen. Obviously there's varying degrees of it, and we don't get it right all the time [laughs], but I think when it feels grounded, it's because we recognize the truth in the material.

Falsehood is never in words; it is in things.

Why do you lie" I ask her. "To block the truth." Fair enough. Naomi goes on. "Where did we get it in our heads that we need truth all the time? Sometimes lies are nice, you know? You don't have to know the truth all the time. It's too exhausting.