Olive Schreiner Quotes

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Always in our dreams we hear the turn of the key that shall close the door of the last brothel; the clink of the last coin that pays for the body and soul of a woman; the falling of the last wall that encloses artificially the activity of woman and divides her from man; always we picture the love of the sexes as once a dull, slow, creeping worm; then a torpid, earthy chrysalis; at last the full-winged insect, glorious in the sunshine of the future.

The brain works better if the hand works too.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

Genius has no limit of sex or race.

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

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

When the curtain falls no one is ready

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.

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.

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.

The surest sign of fitness is success.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Soul, what have I to do with you?

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

[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.

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

Throw a puppy into the water. If it swims, well. If it sinks, well. But do not tie a rope around its throat and weight it with a brick and then assert its incapacity to keep afloat.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.