Olive Schreiner Quotes

50 Sourced Quotes

There is a love that begins in the head, and goes down to the heart, and grows slowly; but it lasts till death, and asks less than it gives. There is another love, that blots out wisdom, that is sweet with the sweetness of life and bitter with the bitterness of death, lasting for an hour; but it is worth having lived a whole life for that hour.

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
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 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
How hard it is to make your thoughts look anything but imbecile fools when you paint them with ink on paper.

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 the bird does like its cage, and does like its sugar, and will not leave it, why keep the door so very carefully shut?

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
I am always thirsting for beautiful, beautiful, beautiful music. I wish I could make it. Perhaps there isn't any music on earth like what I picture to myself.

Olive Schreiner
I said to God, 'What are they doing?'
God said, 'Making pitfalls into which their fellows may sink.'
I said to God, 'Why do they do it?'
God said, 'Because each thinks that when his brother falls he will rise.'

Olive Schreiner
For those of us who have a ground of knowledge which we cannot transmit to outsiders, it is perhaps more profitable to act fearlessly than to argue.

Olive Schreiner
There is no door at which the hand of woman has knocked for admission into a new field of toil but there have been found on the other side the hands of strong and generous men eager to turn it for her, almost before she knocks.

Olive Schreiner
The secret of success is concentration, wherever there has been a great life, or a great work, that has gone before. Taste everything a little, look at everything a little; but live for one thing.

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

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

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
Experience teaches us in a millennium what passion teaches us in an hour.

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
We have been so blinded by thinking and feeling that we have never seen the World.

Olive Schreiner
Now we have no God. We have had two: the old God that our fathers handed down to us, that we hated, and never liked; the new one that we made for ourselves, that we loved; but now he has flitted away from us, and we see what he was made of - the shadow of our highest ideal, crowned and throned. Now we have no God.

Olive Schreiner