Olive Schreiner
Olive Schreiner
Olive Schreinerwas a South African author, anti-war campaigner and intellectual. She is best remembered today for her novel The Story of an African Farm which has been highly acclaimed since its first publication in 1883 for the bold manner in which it deals with some of the burning issues of the day, including agnosticism, existential independence, individualism, the professional aspirations of women, and the elemental nature of life on the colonial frontier. In more recent studies she has also been...
NationalitySouth African
ProfessionWriter
Date of Birth24 March 1855
A child sees everything, looks straight at it, examines it, without any preconceived idea....
When the curtain falls no one is ready
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.
The secret of success is concentration ... Taste everything a little, look at everything a little; but live for one thing.
There is no door at which the hand of woman has knocked for admission into a new field of toil but there have been found on the other side the hands of strong and generous men eager to turn it for her, almost before she knocks.
There's something beautiful about finding one's innermost thoughts in another.
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 think if I were dying and I heard of an act of injustice, it would start me up to a moment's life again.
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.
Wisdom never kicks at the iron walls it can't bring down.
Everything has two sides - the outside that is ridiculous, and the inside that is solemn.
We have always borne part of the weight of war, and the major part ... Men have made boomerangs, bows, swords, or guns with which to destroy one another; we have made the men who destroyed and were destroyed! ... We pay the first cost on all human life.
We all enter the world little plastic beings, with so much natural force, perhaps, but for the rest--blank; and the world tells uswhat we are to be, and shapes us by the ends it sets before us. To you it says--Work; and to us it says--Seem! To you it says--As you approximate to man's highest ideal of God, as your arm is strong and your knowledge great, and the power to labour is with you, so you shall gain all that human heart desires. To us it says--Strength shall not help you, nor knowledge, nor labour. You shall gain what men gain, but by other means. And so the world makes men and women.
Our fathers had their dreams; we have ours; the generation that follows will have its own. Without dreams and phantoms man cannot exist.