Olive Schreiner Quotes

50 Sourced Quotes

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

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

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

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

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

Olive Schreiner