The Story of an African Farm Quotes

“We have been so blinded by thinking and feeling that we have never seen the World.”
― Olive Schreiner, The Story of an African Farm

“All things on earth have their price, and for truth we pay the dearest. We barter it for love and sympathy. The road to honour is paved with thorns; but on the path to truth, at every step you set your foot down on your heart.”
― Olive Schreiner, The Story of an African Farm

“And so, it comes to pass in time, that the earth ceases for us to be a weltering chaos. We walk in the great hall of life, looking up and round reverentially. Nothing is despicable - all is meaningful; nothing is small - all is part of a whole, whose beginning and end we know not. The life that throbs in us is a pulsation from it; too mighty for our comprehension, no too small.
And so, it comes to pass at last, that whereas the sky was at first a small blue rag stretched out over us and so low that our hands might touch it, pressing down on us, it raises itself into an immeasurable blue arch over our heads, and we begin to live again.”
― Olive Schreiner, The Story of an African Farm

“Experience teaches us in a millennium what passion teaches us in an hour.”
― Olive Schreiner, The Story of an African Farm

“Only the sea is like a human being . . .always moving, always something deep in itself is stirring it. It never rests; it is always wanting, wanting, wanting. It hurries on; and then it creeps back slowly without having reached, moaning. It is always asking a question and it never gets the answer.”
― Olive Schreiner, The Story of an African Farm

“I am not in so great a hurry to put my neck beneath any man's foot; and I do not so greatly admire the crying of babies”
― Olive Schreiner, The Story of an African Farm

“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, The Story of an African Farm

“When the curtain falls no one is ready”
― Olive Schreiner, The Story of an African Farm

“Marriage for love is the beautifulest external symbol of the union of souls, marriage without it is the uncleanliest traffic that defiles the world.”
― Olive Schreiner, The Story of an African Farm

“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, The Story of an African Farm

“This dirty little world full of confusion, and the blue rag, stretched overhead for a sky, is so low we could touch it with our hand.”
― Olive Schreiner, The Story of an African Farm

“I am a man who believes nothing, hopes nothing, fears nothing, feels nothing. I am beyond the pale of humanity [...]”
― Olive Schreiner, The Story of an African Farm

“The bees are very attentive to the flowers until their honey is done, and then they fly over them. I don't know if the flowers feel grateful to the bees, they are great fools if they do.”
― Olive Schreiner, The Story of an African Farm

“So age succeeds age, and dream succeeds dream, and of the joy of the dreamer no man knoweth but he who dreameth.
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, The Story of an African Farm

“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, The Story of an African Farm

“The meanest girl who dances and dresses becomes something higher when her children look up into her face and ask her questions. It is the only education we have and which they cannot take from us”
― Olive Schreiner, The Story of an African Farm

“And she said, in a voice strangely unlike her own, 'I see the vision of a poor weak soul striving after good. It was not cut short; and, in the end, it learnt, through tears and much pain, that holiness is an infinite compassion for others; that greatness is to take the common things of life and walk truly among them; that' - she moved her white hand and laid it on her forehead - 'happiness is a great love and much serving. It was not cut short; and it loved what it had learnt - it loved”
― Olive Schreiner, The Story of an African Farm

“I have discovered that of all cursed places under the sun, where the hungriest soul can hardly pick up a few grains of knowledge, a girls' boarding-school is the worst. They are called finishing schools, and the name tells accurately what they are. They finish everything but imbecility and weakness, and that they cultivate.”
― Olive Schreiner, The Story of an African Farm

“why am I so alone, so hard, so cold? I am so weary of myself! It is eating my soul to its core,--self, self, self! I cannot bear this life! I cannot breathe, I cannot live! Will nothing free me from myself?' She pressed her cheek agains the wooden post. 'I want to love! I want something great and pure to lift me to itself! Dear old man, I cannot bear it any more! I am so cold, so hard, so hard; will no one help me!”
― Olive Schreiner, The Story of an African Farm

“I think,' said Lyndall, 'that he is like a thorn-tree, which grows up very quietly, without any one's caring for it, and one day suddenly breaks out into yellow blossoms.”
― Olive Schreiner, The Story of an African Farm

“For a little sould that cries oout aloud for continued personal existence for itseld and its beloved, there is no help. For the sould which know itself no more as a unit, but as part of the Universal Unit of which the Beloved also is part; which feels within itself the throb of the Universal Life; for that soul there is not death.”
― Olive Schreiner, The Story of an African Farm

“Why hate, and struggle, and fight? Let is be as it would.”
― Olive Schreiner, The Story of an African Farm

“Beauty is God's wine, with which He recompenses the souls that love...”
― Olive Schreiner, The Story of an African Farm

“On the path to truth, at every step, you set your foot down on your own heart.”
― Olive Schreiner, The Story of an African Farm

“I have sought,” he said, “for long years I have laboured; but I have not found her. I have not rested, I have not repined, and I have not seen her; now my strength is gone. Where I lie down worn out other men will stand, young and fresh. By the steps that I have cut they will climb; by the stairs that I have built they will mount. They will never know the name of the man who made them. At the clumsy work they will laugh; when the stones roll they will curse me. But they will mount, and on my work; they will climb, and by my stair! They will find her, and through me! And no man liveth to himself and no man dieth to himself.”
― Olive Schreiner, The Story of an African Farm