Ouida Quotes - Page 2

Excess always carries it's own retributions.

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.

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

Christianity is a formula: it is nothing more.

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

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

Fancy tortures more people than does reality

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.

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

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

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.

Indifference is the invisible giant of the world.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

Excess always carries its own retribution.

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.

One must pray first, but afterwards one must help oneself. God does not care for cowards.

Emulation is active virtue; envy is brooding malice.

Belief of some sort is the lifeblood of Art.

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