Top 100 Ouida Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “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

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

— Ouida

3. “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

4. “Love is cruel as the grave.”

— Ouida

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

— Ouida

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

— Ouida

7. “Youth without faith is a day without sun.”

— Ouida

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

— Ouida

9. “The fire of true enthusiasm is like the fires of Baku, which no water can ever quench, and which burn steadily on from night to day, and year to year, because their well-spring is eternal.”

— Ouida

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

— Ouida

11. “Opposition to a man in love is like oil to fire.”

— Ouida

12. “A great love is an absolute isolation and an absolute absorption.”

— Ouida

13. “The joy of a strong nature is as cloudless as its suffering is desolate.”

— Ouida

14. “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

15. “Why is youth so short and age so long?”

— Ouida

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

— Ouida

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

— Ouida

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

— Ouida

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

— Ouida

20. “Friendship needs to be rooted in respect, but love can live upon itself alone.”

— Ouida

21. “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

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

— Ouida

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

— Ouida

24. “Petty laws breed great crimes.”

— Ouida

25. “Brussels is a gay little city that lies as bright within its girdle of woodland as any butterfly that rests upon moss.”

— Ouida

26. “Dissimulation is the only thing that makes society possible; without its amenities the world would be a bear-garden.”

— Ouida

27. “The loss of our illusions is the only loss from which we never recover.”

— Ouida

28. “Excess always carries its own retribution.”

— Ouida

29. “Fame! it is the flower of a day, that dies when the next sun rises.”

— Ouida

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

— Ouida

31. “Dishonor is like the Aaron’s Beard in the hedgerows; it can only poison if it be plucked.”

— Ouida

32. “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

33. “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.”

— Ouida

34. “As a postscript, it is interesting to note that on a visit to London in 1886, Ouida did meet Oscar Wilde and indeed published four articles in his magazine Woman’s World between 1888 and 1889; her experience of knowing Wilde, who described her as “the last romantic”, did influence her later works, however superficially.”

— Ouida

35. “Fame nowadays is little else but notoriety...”

— Ouida

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

— Ouida

37. “A little scandal is an excellent thing; nobody is ever brighter or happier of tongue than when he is making mischief of his neighbors.”

— Ouida

38. “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

39. “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.”

— Ouida

40. “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.”

— Ouida

41. “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.”

— Ouida

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

— Ouida

43. “Charity is a flower not naturally of earthly growth, and it needs manuring with a promise of profit.”

— Ouida

44. “Woman already controls by not seeming to do so. Talk no more of her rights.”

— Ouida

45. “If all feeling for grace and beauty were not extinguished in the mass of mankind at the actual moment, such a method of locomotion as cycling could never have found acceptance; no man or woman with the slightest aesthetic sense could assume the ludicrous position necessary for it.”

— Ouida

46. “Imagination without culture is crippled and moves slowly; but it can be pure imagination, and rich also, as folk-lore will tell the vainest.”

— Ouida

47. “Indifference is the invisible giant of the world.”

— Ouida

48. “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.”

— Ouida

49. “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

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

— Ouida