Olive Schreiner Quotes

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

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

The secret of success is concentration ... Taste everything a little, look at everything a little; but live for one thing.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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?

There's something beautiful about finding one's innermost thoughts in another.

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.

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.

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

Love, smoke and a cough cannot long be hid!

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.

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.

genius has no limit of sex or race.

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

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

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.

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

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.

Without dreams and phantoms man cannot exist.

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.

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.