List of Olive Schreiner Quotes

The Surest Sign Of Fitness Is Success.

How Hard It Is To Make Your Thoughts Look Anything But Imbecile Fools When You Paint Them With Ink On Paper.

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.

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?

Power! Did You Ever Hear Of Men Being Asked Whether Other Souls Should Have Power Or Not? It Is Born In Them.

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.

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.

We Have Been So Blinded By Thinking And Feeling That We Have Never Seen The World.

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.

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.

[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 . . .

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.