Ouida Quotes
The radical defect in Christianity is that it tried to win the world by a bribe, and it has become a nullity.
It is the north wind that lashes men into Vikings; it is the soft, luscious south wind which lulls them to lotus dreams.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Charity is a flower not naturally of earthly growth, and it needs manuring with a promise of profit.
Talent wears well, genius wears itself out; talent drives a snug brougham in fact; genius, a sun-chariot in fancy.
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.
A just chastisement may benefit a man, though it seldom does; but an unjust one changes all his blood to gall.
I have met a thousand scamps; but I never met one who considered himself so. Self-knowledge isn't so common.
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.
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!
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.
Dissimulation is the only thing that makes society possible; without its amenities the world would be a bear-garden.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Fame has only the span of the day, they say. But to live in the hearts of people-that is worth something.
Imagination without culture is crippled and moves slowly; but it can be pure imagination, and rich also, as folk-lore will tell the vainest.
What is failure except feebleness? And what is it to miss one's mark except to aim widely and weakly?
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.
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
One must pray first, but afterwards one must help oneself. God does not care for cowards.--"Wanda
There are wrongs for which religion makes no provision, and of which it has no comprehension.--"Wanda
He mistook, as the cleverest men often do mistake, in underrating the cruelty of women.
