Olive Schreiner Quotes

50 Sourced Quotes

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
No woman has the right to marry a man if she has to bend herself out of shape for him. She might wish to, but she could never be to him with all her passionate endeavor what the other woman could be to him without trying. Character will dominate over all and will come out at last.

Olive Schreiner
There never was a man who said one word for woman but he said two for man and three for the whole human race.

Olive Schreiner
Our fathers had their dreams; we have ours; the generation that follows will have its own. Without dreams and phantoms man cannot exist.

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
The nations which have received and in any way dealt fairly and mercifully with the Jew have prospered, and the nations that have tortured and oppressed him have written out their own curse.

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

Olive Schreiner
One has no right to form ideals of people, and then, because they don't justify them, become bitter.

Olive Schreiner
A word may become so defiled by bad use that it will take a century before it can be purified, and brought into use again.

Olive Schreiner
Marriage has been a very rich and beautiful development of my life. Month by month as we live together we seem to come nearer to each other; and to feel a more complete fellowship. I do not feel that it in any way fetters or narrows my world: — it seems rather to enlarge it.

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
Marriage for love is the most beautiful external symbol of the union of souls; marriage without it is the least clean traffic that defiles the world.

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
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
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
God said, 'When one man and one woman shine together, it makes the most perfect light.'

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

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