Ouida Quotes & Sayings

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

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

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

Youth without faith is a day without sun. — Ouida

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

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

Woman's fatal weakness is to desire sympathy and comprehension.
Wanda — Ouida

Petty laws breed great crimes. — Ouida

Great men have always had dogs. — Ouida

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. — Ouida

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

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? — Ouida

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

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

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

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

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

Love is cruel as the grave. — Ouida

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

Age is nothing but death that is conscious. — Ouida

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

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

In the violent scorn of her revolted pride, of her indignant honor, had she forgotten a lowlier yet harder duty left undone?
In her contempt and dread of yielding to mere amorous weakness had she stifled and denied the cry of pity, the cry of conscience?
To suffer woes which hope thinks infinite. To forgive wrongs darker than death or night. To defy power which seems omnipotent. To love and live to hope till hope creates from it's own wreck the thing it contemplates. Neither to change, nor falter, nor repent.
This had been the higher, diviner way which she had missed, this obligation from the passion of the past which she had left unfulfilled, unaccepted.
Now the misgiving arose in her whether she had mistaken arrogance for duty; whether, cleaving so closely to honor she had forgotten the obligation of mercy. — Ouida

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fame nowadays is little else but notoriety ... — Ouida

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

Histories in blazonry and poems in stone. — Ouida

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

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

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. — Ouida

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

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

Indifference is the invisible giant of the world. — Ouida

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

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

Indifference is the invincible grant of the world. — Ouida

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

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

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

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. — Ouida

Belief of some sort is the lifeblood of Art. — Ouida

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

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

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

Excess always carries its own retribution. — Ouida

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The world never leaves one in ignorance or in peace. — Ouida

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

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

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

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

In lieu of descending to follow the Via Aurelia where it wound down a few miles off the coast, by Santa Maranella and Santa Severa and mediaeval Palo, and the volcanic soil and the steep ravines by Cervetri, where the long avenues of cliff-sepulchres are all that remain to show the site of Caere, and gaining so the mouth of Tiber to ascend the stream in any boat that he might find by Fiumicino, he still struck across the country by cattle-tracks known alone to himself and wild men like him, and chose to leave the Maccarese morasses untrodden in his rear, and had followed the course of the Arrone River as far as the high cliffs up by forsaken Galera. — Ouida

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

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

[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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fancy tortures more people than does reality — Ouida

Christianity is a formula: it is nothing more. — Ouida

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

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. — Ouida

Great men always have dogs. — Ouida

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

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. — Ouida

Emulation is active virtue; envy is brooding malice. — Ouida

Her life had been altogether artificial; she had always been a great garden lily in a hot-house, she had never known what it was to be blown by a fresh breeze on a sun-swept moorland like a heather flower. The hot-house shelters from all chills and is full of perfume, but you can see no horizon from it; that alone is the joy of the moorland. — Ouida