I have no conscience, none, but I would not like to bring a soul into this world. When it sinned and when it suffered something like a dead hand would fall on me, -- ''You did it, you, for your own pleasure you created this thing See your work'' If it lived to be eighty it would always hang like a millstone round my neck, have the right to demand good from me, and curse me for its sorrow. A parent is only like to God if his work turns out bad so much the worse for him he dare not wash his hands of it. Time and years can never bring the day when you can say to your child, ''Soul, what have I to do with you''
More Quotes from Olive Schreiner:
We all enter the world little plastic beings, with so much natural force, perhaps, but for the rest --blank and the world tells us what we are to be, and shapes us by the ends it sets before us.Olive Schreiner
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.
Olive Schreiner
My feeling is that there is nothing in life but refraining from hurting others, and comforting those that are sad.
Olive Schreiner
It is finer to bring one noble human being into the world and rear it well... than to kill ten thousand.
Olive Schreiner
From our earliest hour we have been taught that the thought of the heart, the shaping of the rain-cloud, the amount of wool that grows on a sheep's back, the length of a drought, and the growing of the corn, depend on nothing that moves immutable, at the heart of all things but on the changeable will of a changeable being, whom our prayers can alter. 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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Based on Topics: Conscience Quotes, Parents Quotes, Sadness Quotes, Soul Quotes, Time Quotes, World QuotesBased on Keywords: millstone
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