Best 108 quotes of Ouida on MyQuotes

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

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

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

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

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.

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

A new life is innocent, like an empty page, ready for the hard lessons ahead. GENNITA LOW, Facing Fear To vice, innocence must always seem only a superior kind of chicanery.

A pipe is a pocket philosopher,--a truer one than Socrates, for it never asks questions. Socrates must have been very tiresome, when one thinks of it.

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

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

Charity is a flower not naturally of earthly growth, and it needs manuring with a promise of profit.

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.

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.

Christianity has ever been the enemy of human love.

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.

Christianity is a formula: it is nothing more.

Coleridge cried; "O God, how glorious it is to live!" Renan asks, "O God, when will it be worth while to live?" In Nature we echo the poet; in the world we echo the thinker.

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

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

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

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

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

Emulation is active virtue; envy is brooding malice.

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.

Excess always carries its own retribution.

Excess always carries it's own retributions.

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

Fame nowadays is little else but notoriety.

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

Fancy tortures more people than does reality

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.

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?

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.

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

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

Genius scorns the power of gold: it is wrong. Gold is the war-scythe on its chariot, which mows down the millions of its foes, and gives free passage to the sun-coursers with which it leaves those heavenly fields of light for the gross battlefields of earth.

Great men always have dogs.

Great men have always had dogs.

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

Hypocrites weep, and you cannot tell their tears from those of saints; but no bad man ever laughed sweetly yet.

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

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.

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.

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

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

In a few generations more, there will probably be no room at all allowed for animals on the earth: no need of them, no toleration of them. An immense agony will have then ceased, but with it there will also have passed away the last smile of the world's youth.

Indifference is the invincible grant of the world.

Indifference is the invisible giant of the world.

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.

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?