Olive Schreiner Quotes
-
There's something beautiful about finding one's innermost thoughts in another.
→ -
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.
→ -
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.
→ -
Love, smoke and a cough cannot long be hid!
→ -
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.
→ -
How hard it is to make your thoughts look anything but imbecile fools when you paint them with ink on paper.
→ -
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.
→ -
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.
→ -
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.
→ -
the brain works better if the hand works too.
→ -
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.
→ -
A little weeping, a little wheedling, a little self-degradation, a little careful use of our advantages, and then some man will say .Come, be my wife! With good looks and youth marriage is easy to attain. There are men enough; but a woman who has sold herself, even for a ring and a new name, need hold her skirt aside for no creature in the street. They both earn their bread in one way. 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.
→ -
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.
→ -
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.
→ -
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.
→ -
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.
→ -
Our fathers had their dreams; we have ours; the generation that follows will have its own. Without dreams and phantoms man cannot exist.
→ -
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.
→ -
Wisdom never kicks at the iron walls it can't bring down.
→ -
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?
→ -
Everything has two sides - the outside that is ridiculous, and the inside that is solemn.
→ -
Without dreams and phantoms man cannot exist.
→ -
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.
→ -
When the curtain falls no one is ready
→ -
My feeling is that there is nothing in life but refraining from hurting others, and comforting those who are sad.
→ -
There was never a great man who had not a great mother.
→ -
A child sees everything, looks straight at it, examines it, without any preconceived idea.
→ -
Power! Did you ever hear of men being asked whether other souls should have power or not? It is born in them.
→ -
There are only two things that are absolute realities, love and knowledge, and you can't escape them.
→ -
God said, 'When one man and one woman shine together, it makes the most perfect light.
→
Related Authors
-
Doris Lessing Novelist -
Simone de Beauvoir Writer -
Virginia Woolf Writer -
Stendhal Writer -
Olaf Stapledon Philosopher -
Idries Shah Author -
André Brink Novelist -
Mikhail Bulgakov Writer -
Ruth First Activist -
Havelock Ellis Physician -
H. Rider Haggard Writer -
Edward Carpenter Poet -
D. H. Lawrence Novelist -
Mona Caird Novelist -
Kate Chopin Author -
Alan Paton Author -
J. M. Coetzee Novelist -
Fyodor Dostoevsky Novelist -
Nadine Gordimer Writer -
Mary Kingsley Writer