Olive Schreiner Quotes & Sayings

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

So age succeeds age, and dream succeeds dream, and of the joy of the dreamer no man knoweth but he who dreameth.
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

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

I think,' said Lyndall, 'that he is like a thorn-tree, which grows up very quietly, without any one's caring for it, and one day suddenly breaks out into yellow blossoms. — Olive Schreiner

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

Ones real deathless wealth is all the beautiful souls one has seen and spiritually touched. — 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

When the curtain falls no one is ready — Olive Schreiner

There was never a great man who had not a great mother. — 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

For a little sould that cries oout aloud for continued personal existence for itseld and its beloved, there is no help. For the sould which know itself no more as a unit, but as part of the Universal Unit of which the Beloved also is part; which feels within itself the throb of the Universal Life; for that soul there is not death. — Olive Schreiner

Marriage for love is the beautifulest external symbol of the union of souls, marriage without it is the uncleanliest traffic that defiles the world. — 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

No death, no death,' he muttered; 'there is that which never dies-- which abides. It is but the individual that perishes, the whole remains. It is the organism that vanishes, the atoms are there. It is but hte man that dies, the Universal Whole of which he is part reworks him into its inmost self. Ah! What matters that man's day be short?-- that the sunrise sees him, and the sunset sees his grave; that of which he is but the breath has breathed him forth and drawn him back again. That abides-- we abide... Let us die, beloved, you and I, that we may pass on for ever through the Universal Life!' In that deep world of contemplation all fierce desires die out, and peace comes down. He, Waldo, as he walked there, saw no more the world that was about him; cried out no more for the thing that he had lost. — Olive Schreiner

[Finishing schools] are nicely adapted machines for experimenting on the question, "Into how little space a human being can be crushed?" I have seen some souls so compressed that they would have fitted into a small thimble, and found room to move ... — 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

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

Why hate, and struggle, and fight? Let is be as it would. — 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

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

The surest sign of fitness is success. — Olive Schreiner

We were equals once when we lay new-born babes on our nurse's knees. We will be equal again when they tie up our jaws for the last sleep. — Olive Schreiner

Her name is Truth. He who has once seen her never rests again. Till death he desires her." And the hunter cried: "Oh, tell me where I may find her." But the old man said: "You have not suffered enough," and went. Then — 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

I have discovered that of all cursed places under the sun, where the hungriest soul can hardly pick up a few grains of knowledge, a girls' boarding-school is the worst. They are called finishing schools, and the name tells accurately what they are. They finish everything but imbecility and weakness, and that they cultivate. — 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

I am not in so great a hurry to put my neck beneath any man's foot; and I do not so greatly admire the crying of babies — Olive Schreiner

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

When tha day comes, that you sit down broken, without one human creature to whom you can cling, with your loves the dead and the living-dead; when the very thirst for knowledge through long-continued thwarting has grown dull; when in the present there s not craving, the in the future no hope, then, oh, with a beneficent tenderness, Nature enfolds you. — 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

A child sees everything, looks straight at it, examines it, without any preconceived idea ... — Olive Schreiner

The meanest girl who dances and dresses becomes something higher when her children look up into her face and ask her questions. It is the only education we have and which they cannot take from us — 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

Men's bodies are our women's works of art. Given to us power of control, we will never carelessly throw them in to fill up the gaps in human relationships made by international ambitions and greeds ... War will pass when intellectual culture and activity have made possible to the female an equal share in the governance of modern national life; it will probably not pass away much sooner; its extinction will not be delayed much longer. — Olive Schreiner

Power! Did you ever hear of men being asked whether other souls should have power or not? It is born in them. — 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

The brain works better if the hand works too. — Olive Schreiner

All things on earth have their price, and for truth we pay the dearest. We barter it for love and sympathy. The road to honour is paved with thorns; but on the path to truth, at every step you set your foot down on your heart. — 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

When Love and Life first meet, a radiant thing is born, without a shade. When the roads begin to roughen, when the shades begin to darken, when the days are hard, and the nights cold and long - then it begins to change. — Olive Schreiner

If you are an artist, may no love of wealth or fame or admiration and no fear of blame or misunderstanding make you ever paint, with pen or brush, an ideal of external life otherwise than as you see it. — Olive Schreiner

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

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

There's something so beautiful in coming on one's very inmost thoughts in another. In one way it is one of the greatest pleasures one has. — Olive Schreiner

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

I am a man who believes nothing, hopes nothing, fears nothing, feels nothing. I am beyond the pale of humanity [ ... ] — Olive Schreiner

The bees are very attentive to the flowers until their honey is done, and then they fly over them. I don't know if the flowers feel grateful to the bees, they are great fools if they do. — Olive Schreiner

Love, smoke and a cough cannot long be hid! — Olive Schreiner

The woman wanderer goes forth to seek the Land of Freedom.

"How am I to get there?" Reason answers: "here is one way, and one only. Down the banks of Labour, through the water of suffering. There is no other."

The woman cries out: "For what do I go to this far land which no one has ever reached? Oh, I am alone! I am utterly alone!"

But soon she hears the sounds of feet, 'a thousand times ten thousand and thousands of thousands, and they beat this way!'

"They are the feet of those who shall follow you. Lead on. — 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

Why am I so alone, so hard, so cold? I am so weary of myself! It is eating my soul to its core,
self, self, self! I cannot bear this life! I cannot breathe, I cannot live! Will nothing free me from myself?' She pressed her cheek agains the wooden post. 'I want to love! I want something great and pure to lift me to itself! Dear old man, I cannot bear it any more! I am so cold, so hard, so hard; will no one help me! — Olive Schreiner

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

Soul, what have I to do with you? — 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

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

[O]nly the sea is like a human being ... always moving, always something deep in itself is stirring it. It never rests; it is always wanting, wanting, wanting. It hurries on; and then it creeps back slowly without having reached, moaning. It is always asking a question and it never gets the answer. — Olive Schreiner

And so, it comes to pass in time, that the earth ceases for us to be a weltering chaos. We walk in the great hall of life, looking up and round reverentially. Nothing is despicable - all is meaningful; nothing is small - all is part of a whole, whose beginning and end we know not. The life that throbs in us is a pulsation from it; too mighty for our comprehension, no too small.
And so, it comes to pass at last, that whereas the sky was at first a small blue rag stretched out over us and so low that our hands might touch it, pressing down on us, it raises itself into an immeasurable blue arch over our heads, and we begin to live again. — 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

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

Therehas been a thunder-storm; the ground, as far as the eye can reach, is covered with white hail; the clouds are gone, and overhead a deep blue sky is showing; far off a great rainbow rests on the white earth. We, standing in a window to look, feel the cool, unspeakably sweet wind blowing in on us, and a feeling of longing comes over us
unuterrable longing, we cannot tell for what. — Olive Schreiner

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

Genius has no limit of sex or race. — 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

We fit our sphere as a Chinese woman's foot fits her shoe, exactly, as though God had made both - and yet He knows nothing of either. In some of us the shaping to our end has been quite completed. The parts we are not to use have been quite atrophied and have even dropped ott, but in others, and we are not less to be pitied, they have been weakened and left. We wear the bandages, but out limbs have not grown to them, we know that we are compressed, and chafe against them. — 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

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

It is finer to bring one noble human being into the world and rear it well ... than to kill ten thousand. — Olive Schreiner

I would like to say to the men and women of the generations which will come after us: you will look back at us with astonishment. You will wonder at passionate struggles that accomplished so little, at the, to you, obvious paths to attain our ends which we did not take. At the intolerable evils before which it will seem to you we sat down passive. At the great truths staring us in the face which we failed to see, at the great truths we grasped at but could not get our fingers quite 'round. You will marvel at the labour that ended in so little. But what you will never know that it was how we were thinking of you and for you that we struggled as we did and accomplished the little that we have done. That it was in the thought of your larger realization and fuller life that we have found consolation for the futilities of our own. All I aspire to be and was not, comforts me. — Olive Schreiner

And she said, in a voice strangely unlike her own, 'I see the vision of a poor weak soul striving after good. It was not cut short; and, in the end, it learnt, through tears and much pain, that holiness is an infinite compassion for others; that greatness is to take the common things of life and walk truly among them; that' - she moved her white hand and laid it on her forehead - 'happiness is a great love and much serving. It was not cut short; and it loved what it had learnt - it loved — Olive Schreiner

We all enter the world little plastic beings, with so much natural force, perhaps, but for the rest
blank; and the world tells uswhat we are to be, and shapes us by the ends it sets before us. To you it says
Work; and to us it says
Seem! To you it says
As you approximate to man's highest ideal of God, as your arm is strong and your knowledge great, and the power to labour is with you, so you shall gain all that human heart desires. To us it says
Strength shall not help you, nor knowledge, nor labour. You shall gain what men gain, but by other means. And so the world makes men and women. — Olive Schreiner

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