Ouida
Take hope from the heart of man and you make him a beast of prey.Collection: Hope
Familiarity is a magician that is cruel to beauty but kind to ugliness.Collection: Beauty
An easy-going husband is the one indispensable comfort of life.
Could we see when and where we are to meet again, we would be more tender when we bid our friends goodbye.
To vice, innocence must always seem only a superior kind of chicanery.
A cruel story runs on wheels, and every hand oils the wheels as they run.
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.
Petty laws breed great crimes.
Christianity has made of death a terror which was unknown to the gay calmness of the Pagan.
age is nothing but death that is conscious.Collection: Age
There is a chord in every heart that has a sigh in it if touched aright.Collection: Heart
The world never leaves one in ignorance or in peace.Collection: Ignorance
Intensely selfish people are always very decided as to what they wish. They do not waste their energies in considering the good of others.Collection: Selfish
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.Collection: Beautiful
I do not wish to be a coward like the father of mankind and throw the blame upon a woman.Collection: Father
We only see clearly when we have reached the depths of woe.Collection: Depth
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.Collection: Happiness
Why is youth so short and age so long?Collection: Long
There is no knife that cuts so sharply and with such poisoned blade as treachery.Collection: Cutting
There is a self-evident axiom, that she who is born a beauty is half married.Collection: Beauty
Truth is a rough, honest, helter-skelter terrier that none like to see brought into their drawing rooms.Collection: Drawing
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.Collection: Sweet
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?Collection: Art
Take hope from the heart of man, and you make him a beast of prey.Collection: Hope
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.Collection: Christian
Excess always carries it's own retributions.Collection: Excess
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.Collection: Christian
Charity in various guises is an intruder the poor see often; but courtesy and delicacy are visitants with which they are seldom honored.Collection: Charity
The radical defect in Christianity is that it tried to win the world by a bribe, and it has become a nullity.Collection: Winning
Hypocrites weep, and you cannot tell their tears from those of saints; but no bad man ever laughed sweetly yet.Collection: Laughter
Indifference is the invincible grant of the world.Collection: World
Fame nowadays is little else but notoriety.Collection: Littles
Who has passed by the fates of disillusion has died twice.Collection: Trust
A just chastisement may benefit a man, though it seldom does; but an unjust one changes all his blood to gall.Collection: Men
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.Collection: Light
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!Collection: Witty
For Pastrasche was their alpha and omega; their treasury and granary; their store of gold and wand of wealth; their bread-winner and minister; their only friend and comforter. ... Pastrasche was their dog.Collection: Dog
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.Collection: Vices
No great talker ever did any great thing yet, in this world.Collection: Talking
Imagination without culture is crippled and moves slowly; but it can be pure imagination, and rich also, as folk-lore will tell the vainest.Collection: Moving
Dissimulation is the only thing that makes society possible; without its amenities the world would be a bear-garden.Collection: Garden
the State only aims at instilling those qualities in its public by which its demands are obeyed, and its exchequer is filled. Its highest attainment is the reduction of mankind to clockwork. In its atmosphere all those finer and more delicate liberties, which require treatment and spacious expansion, inevitably dry up and perish. The State requires a taxpaying machine in which there is no hitch, an exchequer in which there is never a deficit, and a public, monotonous, obedient, colorless, spiritless, moving humbly like a flock of sheep along a straight high road between two walls.Collection: Wall
Brussels is a gay little city that lies as bright within its girdle of woodland as any butterfly that rests upon moss.Collection: Lying
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.Collection: Mother
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.Collection: Thinking
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.Collection: Age
The philosopher stands at his desk in the lecture hall, and demonstrates away the soul of man, and with exact thought measures out his atoms and resolves him back to gas and air. But the revolutionary, below in the crowd, hears, and only translates what he hears thus to his brethren: 'Let us drink while we may; property is robbery; this life is all; let us kill and eat; there is no God.Collection: Men
What we love once, we love forever. Shall there be joy in heaven over those who repent, yet no forgiveness for them upon earth? --"WandaCollection: Joy
Histories in blazonry and poems in stone.Collection: Stones
Nature I believe in. True art aims to, represent men and women, not as my little self would have them, but as they appear. My heroes and heroines I want not extreme types, all good or all bad; but human, mortal--partly good, partly bad. Realism I need. Pure mental abstractions have no significance for me.Collection: Art