Ouida Quotes

Petty laws breed great crimes.

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

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.

Love is cruel as the grave.

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.

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

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.

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.

age is nothing but death that is conscious.

The world never leaves one in ignorance or in peace.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Why is youth so short and age so long?

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

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?

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