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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

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Olive Schreiner
Age: 65 †
Born: 1855
Born: March 24
Died: 1920
Died: December 11
Author
Writer
Cape of Good Hope
Olive Emily Albertina Schreiner
Ralph Iron
Olive Emilie Albertina Schreiner
People
Power
Hang
Ideas
Sees
Examines
Everything
Straight
Preconceived
Without
Lose
Veil
Looks
Loses
Veils
Children
Quite
Eleven
Like
Child
Outer
World
Idea
Twelve

More quotes by Olive Schreiner

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God said, 'When one man and one woman shine together, it makes the most perfect light.
Olive Schreiner
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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
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One has no right to form ideals of people, and then, because they don't justify them, become bitter.
Olive Schreiner
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No woman who is a woman says of a human body, 'it is nothing' ... On this one point, and on this point alone, the knowledge of woman, simply as woman, is superior to that of man she knows the history of human flesh she knows its cost he does not.
Olive Schreiner
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How hard it is to make your thoughts look anything but imbecile fools when you paint them with ink on paper.
Olive Schreiner
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It is the swimmer who first leaps into the frozen stream who is cut sharpest by the ice those who follow him find it broken, and the last find it gone. It is the men or women who first tread down the path which the bulk of humanity will ultimately follow, who must find themselves at last in solitudes where the silence is deadly.
Olive Schreiner
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When the curtain falls no one is ready
Olive Schreiner
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[Finishing schools] are nicely adapted machines for experimenting on the question, Into how little space a human being can be crushed? I have seen some souls so compressed that they would have fitted into a small thimble, and found room to move . . .
Olive Schreiner
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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
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Love that has been given to you is too sacred a thing to be talked of to anyone ... except just to the person who is like part of you and who will feel it as you do.
Olive Schreiner
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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
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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
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To us, from the beginning, Nature has been but a poor plastic thing, to be toyed with this way or that, as man happens to please his deity or not to go to church or not to say his prayers right or not to travel on a Sunday or not.Was it possible for us in an instant to see Nature as she is-the flowing vestment of an unchanging reality?
Olive Schreiner
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If Nature here wishes to make a mountain, she runs a range for five hundred miles if a plain, she levels eighty if a rock, she tilts five thousand feet of strata on end our skies are higher and more intensely blue our waves larger than others our rivers fiercer. There is nothing measured, small nor petty in South Africa.
Olive Schreiner
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The surest sign of fitness is success.
Olive Schreiner
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We have been so blinded by thinking and feeling that we have never seen the World.
Olive Schreiner
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Wisdom never kicks at the iron walls it can't bring down.
Olive Schreiner
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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.
Olive Schreiner
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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
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There's something beautiful about finding one's innermost thoughts in another.
Olive Schreiner