Top 40 Olive Schreiner Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Everything has two sides – the outside that is ridiculous, and the inside that is solemn.”

— Olive Schreiner

2. “There are only two things that are absolute realities, love and knowledge, and you can’t escape them.”

— Olive Schreiner

3. “Wisdom never kicks at the iron walls it can’t bring down.”

— Olive Schreiner

4. “There was never a great man who had not a great mother.”

— Olive Schreiner

5. “There’s something so beautiful in coming on one’s very inmost thoughts in another. In one way it is one of the greatest pleasures one has.”

— Olive Schreiner

6. “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.”

— Olive Schreiner

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

— Olive Schreiner

8. “The nations which have received and in any way dealt fairly and mercifully with the Jew have prospered, and the nations that have tortured and oppressed him have written out their own curse.”

— Olive Schreiner

9. “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.”

— Olive Schreiner

10. “When the curtain falls no one is ready.”

— Olive Schreiner

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

— Olive Schreiner

12. “The troubles of the young are soon over; they leave no external mark. If you wound the tree in its youth the bark will quickly cover the gash; but when the tree is very old, peeling the bark off, and looking carefully, you will see the scar there still. All that is buried is not dead.”

— Olive Schreiner

13. “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.”

— Olive Schreiner

14. “There are some of us who in after years say to Fate, ‘Now deal us your hardest blow, give us what you will; but let us never again suffer as we suffered when we were children.’ The barb in the arrow of childhood’s suffering is this: its intense loneliness, its intense ignorance.”

— Olive Schreiner

15. “No woman has the right to marry a man if she has to bend herself out of shape for him. She might wish to, but she could never be to him with all her passionate endeavor what the other woman could be to him without trying. Character will dominate over all and will come out at last.”

— Olive Schreiner

16. “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.”

— Olive Schreiner

17. “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.”

— Olive Schreiner

18. “We are a race of women that of old knew no fear and feared no death, and lived great lives and hoped great hopes; and if today some of us have fallen on evil and degenerate times, there moves in us yet the throb of the old blood.”

— Olive Schreiner

19. “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?”

— Olive Schreiner

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

— Olive Schreiner

21. “Without dreams and phantoms man cannot exist.”

— Olive Schreiner

22. “If the bird does like its cage, and does like its sugar and will not leave it, why keep the door so carefully shut? Why not open it, only a little? Do they know there is many a bird will not break its wings against the bars, but would fly if the doors were open?”

— Olive Schreiner

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

— Olive Schreiner

24. “Experience teaches us in a millennium what passion teaches us in an hour.”

— Olive Schreiner

25. “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.”

— Olive Schreiner

26. “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.”

— Olive Schreiner

27. “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.”

— Olive Schreiner

28. “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.”

— Olive Schreiner

29. “The surest sign of fitness is success.”

— Olive Schreiner

30. “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.”

— Olive Schreiner

31. “A child sees everything, looks straight at it, examines it, without any preconceived idea; most people, after they are about eleven or twelve, quite lose this power, they see everything through a few preconceived ideas which hang like a veil between them and the outer world.”

— Olive Schreiner

32. “When Love and Life first meet, a radiant thing is born, without a shade. When the roads begin to roughen, when the shades begin to darken, when the days are hard, and the nights cold and long – then it begins to change.”

— Olive Schreiner

33. “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.”

— Olive Schreiner

34. “They are called finishing-schools and the name tells accurately what they are. They finish everything.”

— Olive Schreiner

35. “One has no right to form ideals of people, and then, because they don’t justify them, become bitter.”

— Olive Schreiner

36. “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.”

— Olive Schreiner

37. “How hard it is to make your thoughts look anything but imbecile fools when you paint them with ink on paper.”

— Olive Schreiner

38. “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.”

— Olive Schreiner

39. “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.”

— Olive Schreiner

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

— Olive Schreiner

41. “Ones real deathless wealth is all the beautiful souls one has seen and spiritually touched.”

— Olive Schreiner

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

— Olive Schreiner

43. “Soul, what have I to do with you?”

— Olive Schreiner

44. “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.”

— Olive Schreiner

45. “A child sees everything, looks straight at it, examines it, without any preconceived idea...”

— Olive Schreiner

46. “The meanest girl who dances and dresses becomes something higher when her children look up into her face and ask her questions. It is the only education we have and which they cannot take from us.”

— Olive Schreiner

47. “A word may become so defiled by bad use that it will take a century before it can be purifed, and brought into use again.”

— Olive Schreiner

48. “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.”

— Olive Schreiner

49. “If you are an artist, may no love of wealth or fame or admiration and no fear of blame or misunderstanding make you ever paint, with pen or brush, an ideal of external life otherwise than as you see it.”

— Olive Schreiner