Art & Creativity Quote by Sydney J. Harris

Self-control is usually sold as denial; Sydney J. Harris recasts it as governance. “The art of living” isn’t purity or discipline for its own sake, but a practical intelligence: sorting your inner life into impulses worth honoring and impulses that need to be put to work. The line’s kick comes from its double use of “obey.” Some urges are legitimate authorities - hunger, curiosity, tenderness, the need for rest. Others aren’t meant to be starved; they’re meant to be drafted. Ambition, anger, lust, vanity: Harris doesn’t ask you to erase them, he asks you to command them.

That distinction is the subtext: maturity isn’t a war against desire, it’s a reallocation of power. The quote assumes a crowded psyche, a little republic with competing factions. Freedom, in this model, doesn’t mean acting on whatever you feel; it means retaining the ability to decide what gets to be “law” today. It’s also a quiet rebuke to moral absolutism. Harris, a mid-century American journalist, wrote in an era enthralled by self-help maxims, corporate conformity, and Cold War anxieties about “character.” His formulation keeps the moral talk but makes it psychologically modern: the enemy isn’t impulse; it’s unexamined impulse.

Even the syntax performs the idea. “Knowing which” puts cognition first, and “must be made to obey” admits force, effort, practice. The promise is bracingly unsentimental: a good life isn’t found, it’s managed.