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 carefully shut? Why not open it, only a little? Do they know there is many a bird will not break its wings against the bars, but would fly if the doors were open?

~ 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

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

~ 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

[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

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

We bear the world and we make it. ... There was never a great man who had not a great mother-it is hardly an exaggeration.

~ Olive Schreiner

There is nothing in life but refraining from hurting others and comforting those that are sad.

~ Olive Schreiner

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

~ Olive Schreiner

We bear the world and we make it.... There was never a great man who had not a great mother-it is hardly an exaggeration.

~ Olive Schreiner

The surest sign of fitness is success.

~ Olive Schreiner

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

~ Olive Schreiner