Corra Mae Harris Quotes

22 Sourced Quotes

I have long suspected that the power of speech is not a power at all, but a mere form of hysteria from which the living that really know the truth never suffer because they do not fear life or death as we do and can afford to be calm and silent. The frailest flower that blooms knows that it will rise from the dead in the next season's sun, breathe, feel again the dew and rain. Therefore these little ones make no such tragedy as we do of death.

Corra Mae Harris
One trouble with all the churches is that they have too many incurable saints in them, men and women who pray too much and do too little, who cannot forget their own selfish salvation enough to look after other people's without feeling their own spiritual pulse all the time they are doing it. Of late I've sometimes suspected that it is nearly as debilitating to stay in the church all the time as it would be to stay in a hospital all the time.

Corra Mae Harris
I love truth, although I shall die hating mere facts, because they are misleading.

Corra Mae Harris
I was not too stupid to learn, but too smart. Some instinct must have warned me that a woman accomplished in the domestic arts is frequently enslaved by them.

Corra Mae Harris
I remember being very smart, which is a form of stupidity. I try not to remember it, but it occurs to me that I may have felt intellectual. I entertained views too noble or too bitter to be true. I must have done some soul-stretching of my mental neck.

Corra Mae Harris
Maybe I shall never achieve happiness, but one thing I have had - the terrible wisdom of love.

Corra Mae Harris
Invitations to speak upon public occasions are among my most grievous embarrassments. Why is it inferred that one is or can be a public speaker because she has written a book? Writing is a very private business. I do not know any other occupation which requires so much privacy unless it is a life of prayer or a life of crime.

Corra Mae Harris
To be human is to be on the defensive, somewhere, somehow.

Corra Mae Harris
If one's natural feelings are suppressed long enough one develops supernatural feelings and feels surer of having a soul.

Corra Mae Harris
So long as a man attends to his business the public does not count his drinks. When he fails they notice if he takes even a glass of root beer.

Corra Mae Harris
Once you grow accustomed to being famous, you do not realize it, but you are never quite your humble, honest self. No matter how tightly you keep the lid on, there is some watered stock of vanity inside. You are always in danger of the thing's coming off and of giving yourself an air or two. No man or woman was ever so distinguished that this exhibition did not make him ridiculous, especially to those of meaner minds.

Corra Mae Harris
When you have nothing to lose you have everything to gain.

Corra Mae Harris
No one has yet had the courage to memorialize his wealth on his tombstone. A dollar mark would not look well there.

Corra Mae Harris
I think now happiness is a thing you practice like music until you have skill in striking the right notes on time. We have no vocation for it. And I had no practice, not a day when I was free from care and one great anxiety - and one must be free to be happy. I know that much about it by having missed it.

Corra Mae Harris
It is easier to give all your goods to feed the poor, or not to have any goods - only your virtues, to boast of - than it is to judge the rich with charity...

Corra Mae Harris
Nothing fans me into such a state of peaceful mental somnambulance as the intellectual antics of a person who displays his learning, not from vanity always, but frequently because it is all he has got; no real sense, no wisdom of his own, merely much good stuff he has learned from other sources. He spreads it like a garment as any other decent person would to hide the thinness of his shanks.

Corra Mae Harris
The deadly monotony of Christian country life where there are no beggars to feed, no drunkards to credit, which are among the moral duties of Christians in cities, leads as naturally to the outvent of what Methodists call "revivals" as did the backslidings of the people in those days.

Corra Mae Harris
There is something in the quality of the French mind to which I have always felt a reluctant kinship. They are the only people I know who can leap into an enormous vocabulary of words and beat them up with the wings of their spirit into a fine hysterical eloquence.

Corra Mae Harris
Mere words will not do. They must convey the color, charm, and pulse of life. They must have a private twinkle of wit in them that makes a good-natured noise like laughter through the keyhole of the reader's mind.

Corra Mae Harris
Sanity, in my opinion, is an achievement. I have seen very few well-balanced people in my life who were not dunces.

Corra Mae Harris
I believe if we can wait long enough that every honorable sorrow will become a kind of joy.

Corra Mae Harris
Not everything you hear about yourself can be considered good publicity. And if you have delicate sensibilities, the currycomb of public imagination frequently rubs your vanities the wrong way.

Corra Mae Harris