Top 119 Quotes & Sayings by Ouida

Explore popular quotes and sayings by an English novelist Ouida.

Last updated on December 21, 2024.

Ouida was the pseudonym of the English novelist Maria Louise Ramé. During her career, Ouida wrote more than 40 novels, as well as short stories, children's books and essays. Moderately successful, she lived a life of luxury, entertaining many of the literary figures of the day. Under Two Flags, one of her most famous novels, described the British in Algeria. It expressed sympathy for the French colonists—with whom Ouida deeply identified—and, to some extent, the Arabs. The novel was adapted for the stage, and was filmed six times. Her novel A Dog of Flanders is considered a children's classic in much of Asia. The American author Jack London cited her novel Signa as one of the reasons for his literary success. Her lavish lifestyle eventually led her to penury, and her works were put up for auction to pay her debts. She died in Italy from pneumonia. Soon after her death, her friends organized a public subscription in Bury St Edmunds, where they had a fountain for horses and dogs installed in her name.

English - Novelist | January 1, 1839 - January 25, 1908

Source: Wikipedia

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

Ouida

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

Ouida

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

Ouida

Petty laws breed great crimes.

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

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

Ouida

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

Ouida

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

Ouida

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

Ouida

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

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

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

Ouida

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

Ouida

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

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

Fancy tortures more people than does reality

Ouida

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.

Ouida

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

Ouida

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

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 is a formula: it is nothing more.

Ouida

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

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

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

Ouida

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

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

The world never leaves one in ignorance or in peace.

Ouida

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

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

Ouida

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

Ouida

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

Ouida

Why is youth so short and age so long?

Ouida

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

Ouida

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

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

Ouida

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

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

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

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

Ouida

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

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

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.

Ouida

Christianity has ever been the enemy of human love.

Ouida

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

Ouida

age is nothing but death that is conscious.

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

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

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.

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

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

Ouida

Excess always carries it's own retributions.

Ouida

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

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

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

Ouida

Love is cruel as the grave.

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

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

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 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

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

Ouida

Top 119 Quotes & Sayings by Ouida

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