Ouida Quotes

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

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#2. He crept up, and touched the face of the boy. "Didst thou dream that I should be faithless and forsake thee? I - a dog?" said that mute caress.

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#3. Age is nothing but death that is conscious.

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#4. He mistook, as the cleverest men often do mistake, in underrating the cruelty of women.

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

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

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

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#8. Emulation is active virtue; envy is brooding malice.

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#9. 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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#10. Fame nowadays is little else but notoriety ...

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

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

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#14. 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.

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#15. 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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#16. Christianity is a formula: it is nothing more.

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

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#19. 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.

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

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

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

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#23. 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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#24. Who has passed by the fates of disillusion has died twice.

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#25. I only care for the subjective life; I am very German, you see: The woods interest me, and the world does not.

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#26. Woman's fatal weakness is to desire sympathy and comprehension.
Wanda

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

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#28. 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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#29. 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!

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#30. 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 ...

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#31. 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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#32. 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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#33. Death! It is rest to the aged, it is oblivion to the atheist, it is immortality to the poet!

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

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#35. Belief of some sort is the lifeblood of Art.

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

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#37. 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 ...

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#38. 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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#39. Youth without faith is a day without sun.

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#40. 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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#41. Fancy tortures more people than does reality

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

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

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#44. Histories in blazonry and poems in stone.

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#45. 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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#46. The world never leaves one in ignorance or in peace.

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#47. Excess always carries its own retribution.

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#48. 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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#49. All this while the little panel of pine wood remained over the chimney in the mill-kitchen with the cuckoo clock and the waxen Calvary, and sometimes it seemed to Nello a little hard that whilst his gift was accepted he himself should be denied.

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

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

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#54. Love is cruel as the grave.

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#55. Indifference is the invisible giant of the world.

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

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

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

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#61. Death had been more pitiful to them than longer life would have been. It had taken the one in the loyalty of love, and the other in the innocence of faith, from a world which for love has no recompense and for faith no fulfillment.

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

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#63. 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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#64. 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.

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

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

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#67. 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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#68. 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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#69. What is failure except feebleness? And what is it to miss one's mark except to aim widely and weakly?

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

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#71. Great men always have dogs.

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

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#73. There are wrongs for which religion makes no provision, and of which it has no comprehension.
Wanda

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#74. Petty laws breed great crimes.

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

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

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

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#78. Great men have always had dogs.

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#79. 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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#80. 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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#81. 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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#82. 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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#83. A little scandal is an excellent thing; nobody is ever brighter or happier of tongue than when he is making mischief of his neighbors.

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

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

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

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

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#88. And of how he would hang the throat of Patrasche with a collar of gold, and place him on his right hand, and say to the people, "This was once my only friend

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#89. Indifference is the invincible grant of the world.

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

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#91. 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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#92. 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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#93. Most crimes are sanctioned in some form or other when they take grand names.

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#94. 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.

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#95. [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.

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

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

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#98. Christianity has made of death a terror which was unknown to the gay calmness of the Pagan.

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