Olive Schreiner

“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.”

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

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

“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.”

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

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

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

“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?”

“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.”

“It is finer to bring one noble human being into the world and rear it well... than to kill ten thousand.”

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

“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.”

“I would like to say to the men and women of the generations which will come after us: you will look back at us with astonishment. You will wonder at passionate struggles that accomplished so little, at the, to you, obvious paths to attain our ends which we did not take. At the intolerable evils before which it will seem to you we sat down passive. At the great truths staring us in the face which we failed to see, at the great truths we grasped at but could not get our fingers quite 'round. You will marvel at the labour that ended in so little. But what you will never know that it was how we were thinking of you and for you that we struggled as we did and accomplished the little that we have done. That it was in the thought of your larger realization and fuller life that we have found consolation for the futilities of our own. All I aspire to be and was not, comforts me.”

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