Ouida Quotes - Page 3

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

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.

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

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.

Christianity has ever been the enemy of human love.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

[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.

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

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.

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?

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.

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

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

Youth without faith is a day without sun.

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.