# Olive Schreiner

- Quotes: 28
- Author page: https://www.leafyquotes.com/olive-schreiner

## Books

- [The Story of an African Farm](https://www.leafyquotes.com/olive-schreiner/the-story-of-an-african-farm.md) — 28 quotes

## Recently added quotes

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

> “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?”

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

> 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

> "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—”

> 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.

> “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.”

> 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.

> "What need had he of experience? 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.”

> “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”

> “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.”