Ouida Quotes

Belief of some sort is the lifeblood of Art.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

Indifference is the invincible grant of the world.

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?

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.

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

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

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!

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

Indifference is the invisible giant of the world.

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

Love is cruel as the grave.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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?

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.

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

Great men have always had dogs.

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 ...

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

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.

The old man was silent: the truth suggested itself to him with the boy's innocent answer. He was tied to a bed of dried leaves in the corner of a wattle hut, but he had not wholly forgotten what the ways of the world were like.

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

Christianity is a formula: it is nothing more.

Excess always carries its own retribution.

Fancy tortures more people than does reality

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

Youth without faith is a day without sun.

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

The world never leaves one in ignorance or in peace.

Age is nothing but death that is conscious.

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

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

Petty laws breed great crimes.

Emulation is active virtue; envy is brooding malice.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

Great men always have dogs.