Ouida Quotes

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

Emulation is active virtue; envy is brooding malice.

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

Petty laws breed great crimes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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?

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

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

Indifference is the invincible grant of the world.

Excess always carries its own retribution.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Youth without faith is a day without sun.

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.

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

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.

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

Excess always carries it's own retributions.

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.

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

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

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 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.

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.

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.

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

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

Why is youth so short and age so long?

age is nothing but death that is conscious.