Ouida Quotes

85 Sourced Quotes

To vice, innocence must always seem only a superior kind of chicanery.

Ouida
Take hope from the heart of man and you make him a beast of prey.

Ouida
An easy-going husband is the one indispensable comfort of life.

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A cruel story runs on wheels, and every hand oils the wheels as they run.

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Familiarity is a magician that is cruel to beauty but kind to ugliness.

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It is hard work to be good when you are very little and very hungry, and have many sticks to beat you, and no mother's lips to kiss you.

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The Christian religion, outwardly and even in intention humble, does, without meaning it, teach man to regard himself as the most important of all created things. Man surveys the starry heavens and hears with his ears of the plurality of worlds; yet his religion bids him believe that his alone out of these innumerable spheres is the object of his master's love and sacrifice.

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Genius scorns the power of gold: it is wrong. Gold is the war-scythe on its chariot, which mows down the millions of its foes, and gives free passage to the sun-coursers with which it leaves those heavenly fields of light for the gross battlefields of earth.

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Friendship needs to be rooted in respect, but love can live upon itself alone

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If all feeling for grace and beauty were not extinguished in the mass of mankind at the actual moment, such a method of locomotion as cycling could never have found acceptance; no man or woman with the slightest aesthetic sense could assume the ludicrous position necessary for it.

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Charity in various guises is an intruder the poor see often; but courtesy and delicacy are visitants with which they are seldom honored.

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Flowers belong to Fairyland: the flowers and the birds and the butterflies are all that the world has kept of its golden age--the only perfectly beautiful things on earth--joyous, innocent, half divine--useless, say they who are wiser than God.

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A man may be a great statesman, and yet dislike his wife, and like somebody else's. A man may be a great hero, and yet he may have an unseemly passion, or an unpaid tailor. But the British public does not understand this.... It thinks, unhappily or happily as you may choose to consider, that genius should keep the whole ten commandments. Now, genius is conspicuous for breaking them.

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Hypocrites weep, and you cannot tell their tears from those of saints; but no bad man ever laughed sweetly yet.

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Dissimulation is the only thing that makes society possible; without its amenities the world would be a bear-garden.

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Genius cannot escape the taint of its time more than a child the influence of its begetting.

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There is no knife that cuts so sharply and with such poisoned blade as treachery.

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It needs a great nature to bear the weight of a great gratitude.

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The scorn of genius is the most arrogant and the most boundless of all scorn.

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The philosopher stands at his desk in the lecture hall, and demonstrates away the soul of man, and with exact thought measures out his atoms and resolves him back to gas and air. But the revolutionary, below in the crowd, hears, and only translates what he hears thus to his brethren: 'Let us drink while we may; property is robbery; this life is all; let us kill and eat; there is no God.

Ouida
The fire of true enthusiasm is like the fires of Baku, which no water can ever quench, and which burn steadily on from night to day, and year to year, because their well-spring is eternal.

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It is only to those who have never lived that death ever can seems beautiful.

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What we love once, we love forever. Shall there be joy in heaven over those who repent, yet no forgiveness for them upon earth? —"Wanda

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The song that we hear with our ears is only the song that is sung in our hearts.

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When one has not father, or mother, or brother, and all one's friends have barely bread enough for themselves, life cannot be very easy, nor its crusts very many at any time.

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He was by this time in that state of exaltation in which the impossible looks quite natural and commonplace.

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Christianity has been cruel in much to the human race. It has quenched much of the sweet joy and gladness of life; it has caused the natural passions and affections of it to be held as sins.

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Truth is a rough, honest, helter-skelter, terrier, that none like to see brought into their drawing rooms.

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Petty laws breed great crimes. Few rulers, big or little, remember that.

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Coleridge cried; "O God, how glorious it is to live!" Renan asks, "O God, when will it be worth while to live?" In Nature we echo the poet; in the world we echo the thinker.

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