Ouida Quotes

85 Sourced Quotes

Even of death Christianity has made a terror which was unknown to the gay calmness of the Pagan and the stoical repose of the Indian.

Ouida
For Patrasche was their alpha and omega; their treasury and granary; their store of gold and wand of wealth; their bread-winner and minister; their only friend and comforter.... Patrasche was their dog.

Ouida
Nothing is so pleasant... as to display your worldly wisdom in epigram and dissertation, but it is a trifle tedious to hear another person display theirs.

Ouida
Count art by gold, and it fetters the feet it once winged.

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There is no applause that so flatters a man as that which he wrings from unwilling throats.

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In its permission to man to render subject to him all other living creatures of the earth, it continued the cruelty of the barbarian and the pagan, and endowed these with what appeared a divine authority.

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Sport inevitably creates deadness of feeling. No one could take pleasure in it who was sensitive to suffering; and therefore its pursuit by women is much more to be regretted than its pursuit by men, because women pursue much more violently and recklessly what they pursue at all.

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Brussels is a gay little city that lies as bright within its girdle of woodland as any butterfly that rests upon moss.

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They had lived in London and Paris all their lives, and had, before this, heard patriotism used as a reason for a variety of things, from a minister's keeping in office against the will of the country, to a newspaper's writing a country into bloodshed and bankruptcy; they were quite aware of the word's elasticity.

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Indifference is the invincible giant of the world.

Ouida
The longest absence is less perilous to love than the terrible trials of incessant proximity.

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Music is not a science any more than poetry is. It is a sublime instinct, like genius of all kinds.

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Intensely selfish people are always very decided as to what they wish. They do not waste their energies in considering the good of others.

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What use was it to argue with a little idiot like this? Indeed, peasants never do argue; they use abuse.

Ouida
Death! It is rest to the aged, it is oblivion to the atheist, it is immortality to the poet!

Ouida
When you talk yourself, you think how witty, how original, how acute you are; but when another does so, you are very apt to think only — What a crib from Rochefoucauld!

Ouida
There is a chord in every human heart than has a sigh in it if touched aright. When the artist kinds the keynote, which that chord will answer to, in the dullest as in the highest—then he is great.

Ouida
But an old proverb has settled long ago that pride feels no pain, and perhaps the more foolish the pride the less is the pain that is felt — for the moment.

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It is a kind of blindness—poverty. We can only grope through life when we are poor, hitting and maiming ourselves against every angle.

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Humiliation is a guest that only comes to those who have made ready his resting-place, and will give him a fair welcome.... No one can disgrace you save yourself.

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To him all that was indefinite was evil; all that was unfamiliar was horrible. It is the error of ignorance at all times.

Ouida
A great love is an absolute isolation and an absolute absorption.

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I have met a thousand scamps; but I never met one who considered himself so. Self-knowledge isn't so common.

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An easygoing husband is the one indispensable comfort of life.

Ouida
Men are always optimists when they look inwards, and pessimists when they look round them.

Ouida