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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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

More quotes by Olive Schreiner

Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
There was never a great man who had not a great mother.
Olive Schreiner
Image
The surest sign of fitness is success.
Olive Schreiner
Image
God said, 'When one man and one woman shine together, it makes the most perfect light.
Olive Schreiner
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Wisdom never kicks at the iron walls it can't bring down.
Olive Schreiner
Image
One has no right to form ideals of people, and then, because they don't justify them, become bitter.
Olive Schreiner
Image
There are only two things that are absolute realities, love and knowledge, and you can't escape them.
Olive Schreiner
Image
[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
Image
Soul, what have I to do with you?
Olive Schreiner
Image
There's something beautiful about finding one's innermost thoughts in another.
Olive Schreiner
Image
We have been so blinded by thinking and feeling that we have never seen the World.
Olive Schreiner
Image
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
Image
The secret of success is concentration ... Taste everything a little, look at everything a little but live for one thing.
Olive Schreiner