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. They 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 there -- wide room. A woman who has been for many years at one of those places carries the mark of the beast on her till she dies.
More Quotes from Olive Schreiner:
There was never a great man who had not a great mother.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
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.
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
The troubles of the young are soon over they leave no external mark. If you wound the tree in its youth the bark will quickly cover the gash but when the tree is very old, peeling the bark off . . . you will see the scar there still.
Olive Schreiner
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.
Olive Schreiner
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Based on Topics: Education Quotes, Name Quotes, Soul Quotes, Wisdom & Knowledge Quotes, Woman QuotesBased on Keywords: boarding-school, hungriest, imbecility, into, thimble
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