Olive Schreiner

Quotes

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

2. 

   “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?”

3. 

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

4. 

   The full African moon poured down its light from the blue sky into the wide, lonely plain. The dry, sandy earth, with its coating of stunted ‘karroo’ bushes a few inches high, the low hills that skirted the plain, the milk-bushes with their long, finger-like leaves, all were touched by a weird and almost oppressive beauty as they lay in the white light.”

   p. 35

5. 

   "And she said, in a voice strangely unlike her own: “I see the vision of a poor, weak soul striving after good. It was not cut short, and in the end it learnt, through tears and much pain, that holiness is an infinite compassion for others; that greatness is to take the common things of life and walk truly among them; that”—She moved her white hand and laid it on her forehead—“happiness is a great love and much serving. It was not cut short; and it loved what it had learnt—it loved—and—”

6. 

   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.

7. 

   “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.”

8. 

   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.

9. 

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

10. 

    “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.”

11. 

    “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”

12. 

    “I have sought,” he said, “for long years I have laboured; but I have not found her. I have not rested, I have not repined, and I have not seen her; now my strength is gone. Where I lie down worn out other men will stand, young and fresh. By the steps that I have cut they will climb; by the stairs that I have built they will mount. They will never know the name of the man who made them. At the clumsy work they will laugh; when the stones roll they will curse me. But they will mount, and on my work; they will climb, and by my stair! They will find her, and through me! And no man liveth to himself and no man dieth to himself.”