Olive Schreiner quotes

Olive Schreiner was a South African writer and intellectual, renowned for her novel "The Story of an African Farm." Her work addressed issues of feminism, colonialism, and social justice in nineteenth-century South Africa. She remains an influential figure in both South African literature and the global feminist movement. Here are 15 of her quotes:

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

Olive Schreiner

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

Olive Schreiner

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

Olive Schreiner

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

Olive Schreiner

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

Olive Schreiner

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

Olive Schreiner

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

Olive Schreiner

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.

Olive Schreiner

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.

Olive Schreiner

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.

Olive Schreiner

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 . .

Olive Schreiner

Now we have no God. We have had two the old God that our fathers handed down to us, that we hated, and never liked the new one that we made for ourselves, that we loved but now he has flitted away from us, and we see what he was made of -- the shadow of our highest ideal, crowned and throned. Now we have no God.

Olive Schreiner

Slavery may, perhaps, be best compared to the infantile disease of measles a complaint which so commonly attacks the young of humanity in their infancy, and when gone through at that period leaves behind it so few fatal marks but which when it normally attacks the fully developed adult becomes one of the most virulent and toxic of diseases, often permanently poisoning the constitution where it does not end in death.

Olive Schreiner