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Olive Schreiner Quotes

Best Quotes by Olive Schreiner (Top 10)

  1. There was never a great man who had not a great mother.
  2. My feeling is that there is nothing in life but refraining from hurting others, and comforting those who are sad.
  3. Everything has two sides - the outside that is ridiculous, and the inside that is solemn.
  4. 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.
  5. No good work is ever done while the heart is hot and anxious and fretted.
  6. We all enter the world little plastic beings, with so much natural force, perhaps, but for the rest—blank; and the world tells uswhat we are to be, and shapes us by the ends it sets before us. To you it says—Work; and to us it says—Seem! To you it says—As you approximate to man's highest ideal of God, as your arm is strong and your knowledge great, and the power to labour is with you, so you shall gain all that human heart desires. To us it says—Strength shall not help you, nor knowledge, nor labour. You shall gain what men gain, but by other means. And so the world makes men and women.
  7. A little weeping, a little wheedling, a little self-degradation, a little careful use of our advantages, and then some man will say .Come, be my wife! With good looks and youth marriage is easy to attain. There are men enough; but a woman who has sold herself, even for a ring and a new name, need hold her skirt aside for no creature in the street. They both earn their bread in one way. 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.
  8. 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.
  9. 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.
  10. When the curtain falls no one is ready

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