Olive Schreiner Quotes

50 Sourced Quotes

My feeling is that there is nothing in life but refraining from hurting others, and comforting those that are sad.

Olive Schreiner
Men are like the earth and we are the moon; we turn always one side to them, and they think there is no other, because they don't see it—but there is.

Olive Schreiner
Everything has two sides - the outside that is ridiculous, and the inside that is solemn.

Olive Schreiner
Perhaps the old monks were right when they tried to root love out; perhaps the poets are right when they try to water it. It is a blood-red flower, with the color of sin; but there is always the scent of a god about it.

Olive Schreiner
They are called finishing-schools and the name tells accurately what they are. They finish everything.

Olive Schreiner
There are only two things that are absolute realities, love and knowledge, and you can't escape them.

Olive Schreiner
Sin looks much more terrible to those who look at it than to those who do it.

Olive Schreiner
The thought would never come to us as women, 'Cast in men's bodies, settle the thing so.' For woman 'knows the history of human flesh; she knows its cost; man does not.'

Olive Schreiner
I object to anything that divides the two sexes. My main point is this: Human development has now reached a point at which sexual difference has become a thing of altogether minor importance. We make too much of it; we are men and women in the second place; human beings in the first.

Olive Schreiner
No good work is ever done while the heart is hot and anxious and fretted.

Olive Schreiner
No woman who is a woman says of a human body, 'it is nothing'... On this one point, and on this point alone, the knowledge of woman, simply as woman, is superior to that of man; she knows the history of human flesh; she knows its cost; he does not.

Olive Schreiner
If you have a deadly fruit to give, it will not grow sweeter by keeping.

Olive Schreiner
This dirty little world full of confusion, and the blue rag, stretched overhead for a sky, is so low we could touch it with our hand.

Olive Schreiner
Slavery may, perhaps, be best compared to the infantile disease of measles; a complaint which so commonly attacks the young of humanity in their infancy, and when gone through at that period leaves behind it so few fatal marks; but which when it normally attacks the fully developed adult becomes one of the most virulent and toxic of diseases, often permanently poisoning the constitution where it does not end in death.

Olive Schreiner
Power! Did you ever hear of men being asked whether other souls should have power or not? It is born in them. You may dam up the fountain of water, and make it a stagnant marsh, or you may let it run free and do its work; but you cannot say whether it shall be there; it is there. And it will act, if not openly for good, then covertly for evil; but it will act.

Olive Schreiner
Love that has been given to you is too sacred a thing to be talked of to anyone... except just to the person who is like part of you and who will feel it as you do.

Olive Schreiner
Wisdom never kicks at the iron walls it can't bring down.

Olive Schreiner
I think if I was dying and I heard of an act of injustice, it would start me up to a moment's life again.

Olive Schreiner
We are a race of women that of old knew no fear and feared no death, and lived great lives and hoped great hopes; and if today some of us have fallen on evil and degenerate times, there moves in us yet the throb of the old blood.

Olive Schreiner
If Nature here wishes to make a mountain, she runs a range for five hundred miles; if a plain, she levels eighty; if a rock, she tilts five thousand feet of strata on end; our skies are higher and more intensely blue; our waves larger than others; our rivers fiercer. There is nothing measured, small nor petty in South Africa.

Olive Schreiner
To us, from the beginning, Nature has been but a poor plastic thing, to be toyed with this way or that, as man happens to please his deity or not; to go to church or not; to say his prayers right or not; to travel on a Sunday or not.Was it possible for us in an instant to see Nature as she is-the flowing vestment of an unchanging reality?

Olive Schreiner
A child sees everything, looks straight at it, examines it, without any preconceived idea; most people, after they are about eleven or twelve, quite lose this power, they see everything through a few preconceived ideas which hang like a veil between them and the outer world.

Olive Schreiner
The troubles of the young are soon over; they leave no external mark. If you wound the tree in its youth the bark will quickly cover the gash; but when the tree is very old, peeling the bark off, and looking carefully, you will see the scar there still. All that is buried is not dead.

Olive Schreiner
Only the sea is like a human being; the sky is not, nor is the earth. But the sea is always moving, always something deep in itself is stirring it. It never rests; it is always wanting, wanting, wanting.

Olive Schreiner
I know there will be spring, as surely as the birds know it when they see above the snow two tiny, quivering green leaves. Spring cannot fail us.

Olive Schreiner
You can't love a man till you've had a baby with him.

Olive Schreiner
There are some of us who in after years say to Fate, 'Now deal us your hardest blow, give us what you will; but let us never again suffer as we suffered when we were children.' The barb in the arrow of childhood's suffering is this: its intense loneliness, its intense ignorance.

Olive Schreiner
It is the swimmer who first leaps into the frozen stream who is cut sharpest by the ice; those who follow him find it broken, and the last find it gone. It is the men or women who first tread down the path which the bulk of humanity will ultimately follow, who must find themselves at last in solitudes where the silence is deadly.

Olive Schreiner
We have always borne part of the weight of war, and the major part... Men have made boomerangs, bows, swords, or guns with which to destroy one another; we have made the men who destroyed and were destroyed!... We pay the first cost on all human life.

Olive Schreiner
Greatness is to take the common things of life, and walk truly among them.

Olive Schreiner