Quote

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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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
Church
Disaster
Unchanging
Nature
Travel
Deity
Happens
Beginning
Deities
Reality
Loss
Flowing
Right
Please
Prayers
Thing
Prayer
Plastic
Way
Possible
Sunday
Men
Poor
Instant
Toyed

More quotes by Olive Schreiner

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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.
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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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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We have been so blinded by thinking and feeling that we have never seen the World.
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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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
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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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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
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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
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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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There was never a great man who had not a great mother.
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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Without dreams and phantoms man cannot exist.
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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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
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Wisdom never kicks at the iron walls it can't bring down.
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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The surest sign of fitness is success.
Olive Schreiner
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Soul, what have I to do with you?
Olive Schreiner
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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