Daily Inspiration Quote by Sydney J. Harris

"Second thoughts" sounds like a neat little upgrade: reason arriving to correct emotion. Sydney J. Harris flips that comfort. He suggests the phrase smuggles in a judgment about our inner life: the first impulse gets demoted from "thought" to "just feelings" the moment a cooler, later assessment appears. The line works because it catches how language launders self-image. We want to believe we are rational actors who occasionally get interrupted by mood; calling the initial response a feeling preserves the ego while letting us change course without admitting we were thinking badly.

Harris, a mid-century newspaper columnist with a talent for pricking American self-certainty, is also diagnosing a cultural bias. In a society that prizes decisiveness and logic (especially in public life), "second thoughts" become a respectable way to pivot. The subtext: we narrate our revisions as the triumph of intellect, not as a negotiation among competing values, fears, and desires. The first "thought" gets reframed as irrational so the second can wear the crown of maturity.

There's a sly caution embedded here. If we treat first impressions as non-thought, we avoid scrutinizing them. Yet those "feelings" often contain real information: intuition, prior experience, unspoken stakes. Harris isn't romanticizing gut instinct; he's warning against the cheap morality play where reason arrives to save us from ourselves. Real thinking is messier: it starts as feeling, then gets translated, argued with, and sometimes redeemed.