Ouida Quotes

85 Sourced Quotes

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

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

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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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You know the Ark of Israel and the calf of Belial were both made of gold. Religion has never yet changed the metal of her one adoration.

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Women hope that the dead love may revive; but men know that of all dead things none are so past recall as a dead passion.

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Scandals are like dandelion seeds--they are arrow-headed, and stick where they fall, and bring forth and multiply fourfold.

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The bread of bitterness is the food on which men grow to their fullest stature; the waters of bitterness are the debatable ford through which they reach the shores of wisdom; the ashes boldly grasped and eaten without faltering are the price that must be paid for the golden fruit of knowledge.

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The heart of silver falls ever into the hands of brass. The sensitive herb is eaten as grass by the swine.

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It is quite easy for stupid people to be happy; they believe in fables, and they trot on in a beaten track like a horse on a tramway.

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Imagination without culture is crippled and moves slowly; but it can be pure imagination, and rich also, as folk-lore will tell the vainest.

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Charity is a flower not naturally of earthly growth, and it needs manuring with a promise of profit.

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Honor is an old-world thing; but it smells sweet to those in whose hand it is strong.

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Most crimes are sanctioned in some form or other when they take grand names.

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The art of pleasing is more based on the art of seeming pleased than people think of, and she disarmed the prejudices of her enemies by the unaffected delight she appeared to take in themselves.

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I do not wish to be a coward like the father of mankind and throw the blame upon a woman.

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There is nothing that you may not get people to believe in if you will only tell it them loud enough and often enough, till the welkin rings with it.

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

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You have not a boat of your own, that is just it; that is what women always suffer from; they have to steer, but the craft is some one else's, and the haul too.

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In a few generations more, there will probably be no room at all allowed for animals on the earth: no need of them, no toleration of them. An immense agony will have then ceased, but with it there will also have passed away the last smile of the world's youth.

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Power is sweet, and when you are a little clerk you love its sweetness quite as much as if you were an emperor, and maybe you love it a good deal more.

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What is it that love does to a woman? Without it, she only sleeps; with it, alone, she lives.

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Poverty is very terrible, and sometimes kills the very soul within us; but it is the north wind that lashes men into Vikings; it is the soft luscious south wind which lulls them to lotus dreams.

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Fame! It is the flower of a day, that dies when the next sun rises.

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There is no more terrible woe upon earth than the woe of the stricken brain, which remembers the days of its strength, the living light of its reasons, the sunrise of its proud intelligence, and knows that these have passed away like a tale that is told.

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For what is the gift of the poet and the artist except to see the sights which others cannot see and to hear the sounds that others cannot hear?

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Love, the one supreme, unceasing source of human felicity, the one sole joy which lifts the whole mortal existence into the empyrean, was by it [Christianity] degraded into the mere mechanical action of reproduction.

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We do not want to think. We do not want to hear. We do not care about anything. Only give us a good dinner and plenty of money, and let us outshine our neighbors. There is the Nineteenth Century Gospel.

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When passion and habit long lie in company it is only slowly and with incredulity that habit awakens to finds its companion fled, itself alone.

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