Olive Schreiner

“On the path to truth, at every step, you set your foot down on your own heart.”

“For a little sould that cries oout aloud for continued personal existence for itseld and its beloved, there is no help. For the sould which know itself no more as a unit, but as part of the Universal Unit of which the Beloved also is …

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

“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 …

“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.”

“The meanest girl who dances and dresses becomes something higher when her children look up into her face and ask her questions. It is the only education we have and which they cannot take from us”

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

“So age succeeds age, and dream succeeds dream, and of the joy of the dreamer no man knoweth but he who dreameth.

“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 …

“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.”

“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?”

“I am not in so great a hurry to put my neck beneath any man's foot; and I do not so greatly admire the crying of babies”

“When the curtain falls no one is ready”

“[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, …

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

“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.”

"What need had he of experience? Experience teaches us in a millennium what passion teaches us in an hour."

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.

Marriage for love is the beautifulest external symbol of the union of souls, marriage without it is the uncleanliest traffic that defiles the world.

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.

We have been so blinded by thinking and feeling that we have never seen the World.

It is delightful to be a woman; but every man thanks the Lord devoutly that he isn’t one.

Very tenderly the old man looked at him. He saw not the bloated body nor the evil face of the man; but, as it were, under deep disguise and fleshly concealment, the form that long years of dreaming had made very real to him.

And you do not need to. When you are seventeen this Boer-woman will go; you will have this farm and everything that is upon it for your own; but I,’ said Lyndall, ‘will have nothing. I must learn.’”