Quotes from Olive Schreiner

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 they are. They finish everything but imbecility and weakness, and that they cultivate.

Throw a puppy into the water. If it swims, well. If it sinks, well. But do not tie a rope around its throat and weight it with a brick and then assert its incapacity to keep afloat.

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.

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

There never was a man who said one word for woman but he said two for man and three for the whole human race.

You can't love a man till you've had a baby with him.

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

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

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.

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

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.

Power! Did you ever hear of men being asked whether other souls should have power or not? It is born in them. You may dam up the fountain of water, and make it a stagnant marsh, or you may let it run free and do its work; but you cannot say whether it shall be there; it is there. And it will act, if not openly for good, then covertly for evil; but it will act.

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.

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.

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

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 part; which feels within itself the throb of the Universal Life; for that soul there is not death.

Always in our dreams we hear the turn of the key that shall close the door of the last brothel; the clink of the last coin that pays for the body and soul of a woman; the falling of the last wall that encloses artificially the activity of woman and divides her from man; always we picture the love of the sexes, as, once a dull, slow, creeping worm; then a torpid, earthy chrysalis; at last the full-winged insect, glorious in the sunshine of the future.

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

Beauty is God's wine, with which He recompenses the souls that love...