Top 100 Ouida Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “There is no more terrible woe upon earth than the woe of the stricken brain, which remembers the days of its strength, the living light of its reason, the sunrise of its proud intelligence, and knows that these have passed away like a tale that is told...”

— Ouida

52. “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.”

— Ouida

53. “Christianity has made of death a terror which was unknown to the gay calmness of the Pagan.”

— Ouida

54. “Scandals are like dandelion seeds – they are arrow-headed, and stick where they fall, and bring forth and multiply fourfold.”

— Ouida

55. “No doubt the shortness of your memories is a very convenient thing for you; for without it I really don’t know how you could have the conscience to repudiate your debts, swear in your witness boxes, take your marriage vows, traverse your divorce petitions, or do half the things that you do do. But, owing to the perfection of our remembrance, I can recall every trifle of the life that I then enjoyed with him.”

— Ouida

56. “Death! It is rest to the aged, it is oblivion to the atheist, it is immortality to the poet!”

— Ouida

57. “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.”

— Ouida

58. “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.”

— Ouida

59. “Fancy tortures more people than does reality.”

— Ouida

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

— Ouida

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

— Ouida

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

— Ouida

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

— Ouida

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

— Ouida

65. “Belief of some sort is the lifeblood of Art.”

— Ouida

66. “Then he went straightway to the presence-chamber; and he spoke in the speech of men; and he told his lord of that frail wife’s dishonor, and said, ‘Arise I cast her off, and be strong as thou ever hast been.’ But the king, mad with rage, would not hearken; he leaped down from his ivory throne, and drew bis dagger out from his girdle, and thrust it into the heart of Ilderiui. ‘So serve I the foes of my angel!’ he cried; and Ilderim fell at his feet. ‘I forgive,’ he said simply, – and died.”

— Ouida

67. “He crept up, and touched the face of the boy. “Didst thou dream that I should be faithless and forsake thee? I – a dog?” said that mute caress.”

— Ouida

68. “Emulation is active virtue; envy is brooding malice.”

— Ouida

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

— Ouida

70. “The song that we hear with our ears is only the song that is sung in our hearts.”

— Ouida

71. “Men object to the surveillance of a wife, and most justly; but they seem to forget that it is nothing compared to the unscrupulous espionage of a courtesan.”

— Ouida

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

— Ouida

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

— Ouida

74. “Trust was right, as, looking back on that time, I know now, in thinking that Ben had some touch in him of the poet. Not of the poet’s utterance, surely; I do not think he could have strung a line of words together to save his existence; but of the poet’s temperament, of the poet’s feeling.”

— Ouida

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

— Ouida

76. “It is a kind of blindness – poverty. We can only grope through life when we are poor, hitting and maiming ourselves against every angle.”

— Ouida

77. “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.”

— Ouida

78. “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...”

— Ouida

79. “We do not want to think. We do not want to hear. We do not care about anything. Only give us a good dinner and plenty of money, and let us outshine our neighbors. There is the Nineteenth Century Gospel.”

— Ouida

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

— Ouida

81. “Great men always have dogs.”

— Ouida

82. “Christianity is a formula: it is nothing more.”

— Ouida

83. “In a few generations more, there will probably be no room at all allowed for animals on the earth: no need of them, no toleration of them. An immense agony will have then ceased, but with it there will also have passed away the last smile of the world’s youth.”

— Ouida

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

— Ouida

85. “There’s a deal of goodness that the world never sees,” said Tussler in conclusion, “as there’s a deal of viciousness it never guesses.”

— Ouida

86. “Who has passed by the fates of disillusion has died twice.”

— Ouida

87. “Genius cannot escape the taint of its time more than a child the influence of its begetting.”

— Ouida

88. “What is failure except feebleness? And what is it to miss one’s mark except to aim widely and weakly?”

— Ouida

89. “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.”

— Ouida

90. “Whatever good I have kept in me – and in the world it is very hard to keep any – I owe it to Ben on those still Sunday mornings in those deep, old, quiet, green woods.”

— Ouida

91. “Experience is an excellent spyglass; but it has this drawback, that Prejudice very often clouds the lens.”

— Ouida

92. “No great talker ever did any great thing yet, in this world.”

— Ouida

93. “The old man was silent: the truth suggested itself to him with the boy’s innocent answer. He was tied to a bed of dried leaves in the corner of a wattle hut, but he had not wholly forgotten what the ways of the world were like.”

— Ouida

94. “Christianity has ever been the enemy of human love.”

— Ouida

95. “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.”

— Ouida

96. “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.”

— Ouida

97. “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.”

— Ouida

98. “A just chastisement may benefit a man, though it seldom does; but an unjust one changes all his blood to gall.”

— Ouida

99. “This was thoroughly irrational in me, of course. The happiness of our very early years is quite unconscious, and derives its peace from that very unconsciousness. If a child, or a puppy, knew he were happy, he would be analytical; and with the first moment of self-analysis the first shadow of discomfort would fall.”

— Ouida

100. “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!”

— Ouida