Top 99 Ouida Quotes
#1. I have known a thousand scamps; but I never met one who considered himself so. Self-knowledge isn't so common. - OUIDA
Kerry Patterson
#2. There are wrongs for which religion makes no provision, and of which it has no comprehension.
Wanda
Ouida
#3. Petty laws breed great crimes.
Ouida
#4. I do not wish to be a coward like the father of mankind and throw the blame upon a woman.
Ouida
#5. Great men always have dogs.
Ouida
#6. Scandals are like dandelion seeds
they are arrow-headed, and stick where they fall, and bring forth and multiply fourfold.
Ouida
#7. What is failure except feebleness? And what is it to miss one's mark except to aim widely and weakly?
Ouida
#8. 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
Ouida
#9. The heart of silver falls ever into the hands of brass. The sensitive herb is eaten as grass by the swine.
Ouida
#10. A great love is an absolute isolation and an absolute absorption.
Ouida
#11. Fame has only the span of the day, they say. But to live in the hearts of people-that is worth something.
Ouida
#12. 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.
Ouida
#13. 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?
Ouida
#14. Honor is an old-world thing; but it smells sweet to those in whose hand it is strong.
Ouida
#15. 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.
Ouida
#16. The radical defect in Christianity is that it tried to win the world by a bribe, and it has become a nullity.
Ouida
#17. Dissimulation is the only thing that makes society possible; without its amenities the world would be a bear-garden.
Ouida
#18. 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 ...
Ouida
#19. Music is not a science any more than poetry is. It is a sublime instinct, like genius of all kinds.
Ouida
#20. Intensely selfish people are always very decided as to what they wish. They do not waste their energies in considering the good of others.
Ouida
#21. Indifference is the invisible giant of the world.
Ouida
#22. Love is cruel as the grave.
Ouida
#23. A just chastisement may benefit a man, though it seldom does; but an unjust one changes all his blood to gall.
Ouida
#24. 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.
Ouida
#25. To vice, innocence must always seem only a superior kind of chicanery.
Ouida
#26. Fame! it is the flower of a day, that dies when the next sun rises.
Ouida
#27. Christianity has made of death a terror which was unknown to the gay calmness of the Pagan.
Ouida
#28. It needs a great nature to bear the weight of a great gratitude.
Ouida
#29. One must pray first, but afterwards one must help oneself. God does not care for cowards.
Wanda
Ouida
#30. [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.
Ouida
#31. 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.
Ouida
#32. Most crimes are sanctioned in some form or other when they take grand names.
Ouida
#33. 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.
Ouida
#34. 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.
Ouida
#35. There is a chord in every heart that has a sigh in it if touched aright.
Ouida
#36. Indifference is the invincible grant of the world.
Ouida
#37. 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
Ouida
#38. The loss of our illusions is the only loss from which we never recover.
Ouida
#39. 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.
Ouida
#40. The joy of a strong nature is as cloudless as its suffering is desolate.
Ouida
#41. A cruel story runs on wheels, and every hand oils the wheels as they run.
Ouida
#42. A little scandal is an excellent thing; nobody is ever brighter or happier of tongue than when he is making mischief of his neighbors.
Ouida
#43. 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.
Ouida
#44. Imagination without culture is crippled and moves slowly; but it can be pure imagination, and rich also, as folk-lore will tell the vainest.
Ouida
#45. 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.
Ouida
#46. 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.
Ouida
#47. Great men have always had dogs.
Ouida
#48. Take hope from the heart of man and you make him a beast of prey.
Ouida
#49. Familiarity is a magician that is cruel to beauty but kind to ugliness.
Ouida
#50. Men are always optimists when they look inwards, and pessimists when they look round them.
Ouida
#51. 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.
Ouida
#52. Who has passed by the fates of disillusion has died twice.
Ouida
#53. Brussels is a gay little city that lies as bright within its girdle of woodland as any butterfly that rests upon moss.
Ouida
#54. Genius cannot escape the taint of its time more than a child the influence of its begetting.
Ouida
#55. There is no applause that so flatters a man as that which he wrings from unwilling throats ...
Ouida
#56. There is no knife that cuts so sharply and with such poisoned blade as treachery.
Ouida
#57. 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
#58. Dishonor is like the Aaron's Beard in the hedgerows; it can only poison if it be plucked.
Ouida
#59. 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.
Ouida
#60. Christianity is a formula: it is nothing more.
Ouida
#61. 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.
Ouida
#62. 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.
Ouida
#63. An easy-going husband is the one indispensable comfort of life.
Ouida
#64. I only care for the subjective life; I am very German, you see: The woods interest me, and the world does not.
Ouida
#65. Truth is a rough, honest, helter-skelter terrier that none like to see brought into their drawing rooms.
Ouida
#66. Fame nowadays is little else but notoriety ...
Ouida
#67. 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.
Ouida
#68. Emulation is active virtue; envy is brooding malice.
Ouida
#69. We only see clearly when we have reached the depths of woe.
Ouida
#70. The song that we hear with our ears is only the song that is sung in our hearts.
Ouida
#71. Count art by gold, and it fetters the feet it once winged.
Ouida
#72. He mistook, as the cleverest men often do mistake, in underrating the cruelty of women.
Ouida
#73. Age is nothing but death that is conscious.
Ouida
#74. 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.
Ouida
#75. Could we see when and where we are to meet again, we would be more tender when we bid our friends goodbye.
Ouida
#76. 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 ...
Ouida
#77. It is the north wind that lashes men into Vikings; it is the soft, luscious south wind which lulls them to lotus dreams.
Ouida
#78. Excess always carries its own retribution.
Ouida
#79. The world never leaves one in ignorance or in peace.
Ouida
#80. 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.
Ouida
#81. Histories in blazonry and poems in stone.
Ouida
#82. No great talker ever did any great thing yet, in this world.
Ouida
#83. I have know a thousand scamps; but I never met one who considered himself so. Self-knowledge isn't so common.
Ouida
#84. Fancy tortures more people than does reality
Ouida
#85. 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.
Ouida
#86. Youth without faith is a day without sun.
Ouida
#87. 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.
Ouida
#88. 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 ...
Ouida
#89. Woman already controls by not seeming to do so. Talk no more of her rights.
Ouida
#90. Belief of some sort is the lifeblood of Art.
Ouida
#91. Friendship needs to be rooted in respect, but love can live upon itself alone
Ouida
#92. Death! It is rest to the aged, it is oblivion to the atheist, it is immortality to the poet!
Ouida
#93. 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.
Ouida
#94. 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.
Ouida
#95. 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 ...
Ouida
#96. 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
#97. 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.
Ouida
#98. The scorn of genius is the most arrogant and the most boundless of all scorn.
Ouida
#99. Woman's fatal weakness is to desire sympathy and comprehension.
Wanda
Ouida
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top