Ouida quotes

Fancy tortures more people than does reality

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

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.

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

Friendship is usually treated...as a tough...thing which will survive all manner of bad treatment. But this is an exceedingly great and foolish error; it may die in an hour of a single unwise word.

Talent wears well, genius wears itself out; talent drives a snug brougham in fact; genius, a sun-chariot in fancy.

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.

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?

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!

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

Is there a more pitiable spectacle than that of a wife contending with others for that charm in her husband's sight which no philters and no prayers can renew when once it has fled forever? Women are so unwise. Love is like a bird's song beautiful and eloquent when heard in forest freedom, harsh and worthless in repetition when sung from behind prison bars. You cannot secure love by vigilance, by environment, by captivity. What use is it to keep the person of a man beside you if his soul be truant from you?

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.

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

Christianity is a formula: it is nothing more.

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

Excess always carries its own retribution.

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.

the State only aims at instilling those qualities in its public by which its demands are obeyed, and its exchequer is filled. Its highest attainment is the reduction of mankind to clockwork. In its atmosphere all those finer and more delicate liberties, which require treatment and spacious expansion, inevitably dry up and perish. The State requires a taxpaying machine in which there is no hitch, an exchequer in which there is never a deficit, and a public, monotonous, obedient, colorless, spiritless, moving humbly like a flock of sheep along a straight high road between two walls.

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.

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.

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

Woman's fatal weakness is to desire sympathy and comprehension. --"Wanda

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.

What is failure except feebleness? And what is it to miss one's mark except to aim widely and weakly?

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.

[On Christianity:] Its lip-service and its empty rites have made it the easiest of all tasks for the usurer to cloak his cruelties, the miser to hide his avarice, the lawyer to condone his lies, the sinner of all social sins to purchase the social immunity from them by outward deference to churches.

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.

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.

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

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.

Dishonor is like the Aaron's Beard in the hedgerows; it can only poison if it be plucked.

We only see clearly when we have reached the depths of woe.

Belief of some sort is the lifeblood of Art.

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.

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

Petty laws breed great crimes.

Who has passed by the fates of disillusion has died twice.

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

Christianity has ever been the enemy of human love; it has forever cursed and expelled and crucified the one passion which sweetens and smiles on human life, which makes the desert blossom as the rose, and which glorifies the common things and common ways of earth. It made of this, the angel of life, a shape of sin and darkness ... Even in the unions which it reluctantly permitted, it degraded and dwarfed the passion which it could not entirely exclude, and permitted it coarsely to exist for the mere necessity of procreation.

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.

Youth without faith is a day without sun.

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

Why is youth so short and age so long?

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

Great men always have dogs.

Nature I believe in. True art aims to, represent men and women, not as my little self would have them, but as they appear. My heroes and heroines I want not extreme types, all good or all bad; but human, mortal--partly good, partly bad. Realism I need. Pure mental abstractions have no significance for me.

Fame nowadays is little else but notoriety.

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

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

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.

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.

The world never leaves one in ignorance or in peace.

Indifference is the invisible giant of the world.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

Christianity has ever been the enemy of human love.

One must pray first, but afterwards one must help oneself. God does not care for cowards.

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

The joy of a strong nature is as cloudless as its suffering is desolate.

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

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

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

Excess always carries it's own retributions.

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

Great men have always had dogs.

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

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

A little scandal is an excellent thing; nobody is ever brighter or happier of tongue than when he is making mischief of his neighbors.

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

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.

Emulation is active virtue; envy is brooding malice.

A new life is innocent, like an empty page, ready for the hard lessons ahead. GENNITA LOW, Facing Fear To vice, innocence must always seem only a superior kind of chicanery.

The loss of our illusions is the only loss from which we never recover.

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

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.

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.

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

For Pastrasche 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. ... Pastrasche was their dog.

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.

Love is cruel as the grave.

There is a chord in every heart that has a sigh in it if touched aright.

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

Histories in blazonry and poems in stone.

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.

A just chastisement may benefit a man, though it seldom does; but an unjust one changes all his blood to gall.

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

Woman already controls by not seeming to do so. Talk no more of her rights.

There is a self-evident axiom, that she who is born a beauty is half married.

Fame has only the span of the day, they say. But to live in the hearts of people-that is worth something.

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

The radical defect in Christianity is that it tried to win the world by a bribe, and it has become a nullity.

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.

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

age is nothing but death that is conscious.

Friendship is such an elastic word. There never was an age when it stood for so many things in private, and was yet so absolutely non-existent in fact.

It is the north wind that lashes men into Vikings; it is the soft, luscious south wind which lulls them to lotus dreams.

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.

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 reason, the sunrise of its proud intelligence, and knows that these have passed away like a tale that is told.

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

I have known men who have been sold and bought a hundred times, who have only got very fat and very comfortable in the process of exchange.

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

Indifference is the invincible grant of the world.

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.

Could we see when and where we are to meet again, we would be more tender when we bid our friends goodbye.

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

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.

No great talker ever did any great thing yet, in this world.

Opposition to a man in love is like oil to fire.

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

Christianity ... has produced the iniquities of the Inquisition, the egotism and celibacy of the monasteries, the fury of religious wars, the ferocity of the Hussite, of the Catholic, of the Puritan, of the Spaniard, of the Irish Orangeman and of the Irish Papist; it has divided families, alienated friends, lighted the torch of civil war, and borne the virgin and the greybeard to the burning pile, broken delicate limbs upon the wheel and wrung the souls and bodies of innocent creatures on the rack; all this it has done, and done in the name of God.

A pipe is a pocket philosopher,--a truer one than Socrates, for it never asks questions. Socrates must have been very tiresome, when one thinks of it.

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