Ouida famous quotes

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

#Art #Sight #Poetry

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

#Art #Feet #Gold

Petty laws breed great crimes.
-- Ouida

#Law #Liberty #Crime

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

#Friendship #Goodbye #Farewell

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

#Father #Coward #Wish

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

#Running #Oil #Hands

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

#Heart #Men #Beast

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

#Drawing #Rooms #Honest

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

#Christian #Gay #Pagan

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

#Selfish #People #Wish

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

#Mother #Hard Work #Kissing

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

#Ignorance #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?
-- Ouida

#Beautiful #Song #Prayer

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

#Talking #World #Talkers

Love is cruel as the grave.
-- Ouida

#Love Is #Graves

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

#Cutting #Knives #Blades

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

#Trust #Fate #Disillusion

age is nothing but death that is conscious.
-- Ouida

#Age #Conscious

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

#Art #Thinking #People

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

#Art #Belief

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

#Sweet #Clerks #Littles

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

#Wit #Trifles #Bores

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

#Sports #Men #Feelings

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

#Song #Heart #Ears

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

#Flower #Promise #Growth

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

#Fall #Heart #Destiny

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

#Beautiful #Death

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

#Failure #Missing #Mark

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

#Flower #Next #Sun

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

#Happiness #Horse #Stupid

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

#Sweet #Strong #Smell

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

#Moving #Imagination #Culture

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.
-- Ouida

#Life #Echoes #World

Opposition to a man in love is like oil to fire.
-- Ouida

#Love #Men #Oil

Women hope that the dead love may revive; but men know that of all dead things none are so past recall as a dead passion.
-- Ouida

#Love #Passion #Men

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

#Music #Sublime #Genius

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

#Men #Optimism #Looks

Why is youth so short and age so long?
-- Ouida

#Long #Age #Youth

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

#Charity #Delicacy #Poor

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

#Believe #People #May

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

#Christian #Believe #Humble

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

#Joy #Religion #Action

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

#Angel #Passion #Rose

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

#Men #Religion #Earth

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

#Sweet #Passion #Race

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.
-- Ouida

#Religious #War #Names

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

#Giving #Guests #Welcome

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

#Self #Common #Mets

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

#Women #Suffering #Crafts

[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

#Lying #Hypocrisy #Religion

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

#Lying #Passion #Long

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

#Gratitude #Bears #Needs

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.
-- Ouida

#Money #War #Light

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

#Men #Blood #Benefits

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

#Light #Brain #Sunrise

the State only aims at instilling those qualities in its public by which its demands are obeyed, and its exchequer is filled. Its highest attainment is the reduction of mankind to clockwork. In its atmosphere all those finer and more delicate liberties, which require treatment and spacious expansion, inevitably dry up and perish. The State requires a taxpaying machine in which there is no hitch, an exchequer in which there is never a deficit, and a public, monotonous, obedient, colorless, spiritless, moving humbly like a flock of sheep along a straight high road between two walls.
-- Ouida

#Wall #Moving #Sheep

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

#Thinking #Giving #Care

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

#Witty #Thinking #Doe

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

#Death #Atheist #Oblivion

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

#Dog #Gold #Bread

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

#Littles #Fame #Notoriety

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

#Hero #Passion #Men

Indifference is the invisible giant of the world.
-- Ouida

#World #Giants #Indifference