Quotes from 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.

Without dreams and phantoms man cannot exist.

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.

There is nothing ridiculous in love.

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.

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

For those of us who have a ground of knowledge which we cannot transmit to outsiders, it is perhaps more profitable to act fearlessly than to argue.

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.

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

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.

God said, 'When one man and one woman shine together, it makes the most perfect light.

Love, smoke and a cough cannot long be hid!

Love that has been given to you is too sacred a thing to be talked of to anyone ... except just to the person who is like part of you and who will feel it as you do.

There are only two things that are absolute realities, love and knowledge, and you can't escape them.

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

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.

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

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

The surest sign of fitness is success.

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.

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

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.

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