Ouida
Fame has only the span of the day, they say. But to live in the hearts of people-that is worth something.Collection: Heart
A little scandal is an excellent thing; nobody is ever brighter or happier of tongue than when he is making mischief of his neighbors.Collection: Littles
Scandals are like dandelion seeds--they are arrow-headed, and stick where they fall, and bring forth and multiply fourfold.Collection: Fall
The loss of our illusions is the only loss from which we never recover.Collection: Loss
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.Collection: Acceptance
Great men always have dogs.Collection: Dog
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.Collection: Friendship
The song that we hear with our ears is only the song that is sung in our hearts.Collection: Love
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.Collection: Death
Woman's fatal weakness is to desire sympathy and comprehension. --"WandaCollection: Desire
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.Collection: Spring
Excess always carries its own retribution.Collection: Excess
Fame! it is the flower of a day, that dies when the next sun rises.Collection: Flower
The heart of silver falls ever into the hands of brass. The sensitive herb is eaten as grass by the swine.Collection: Fall
Charity is a flower not naturally of earthly growth, and it needs manuring with a promise of profit.Collection: Flower
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.Collection: Men
Woman already controls by not seeming to do so. Talk no more of her rights.Collection: Rights
It is a kind of blindness--poverty. We can only grope through life when we are poor, hitting and maiming ourselves against every angle.Collection: Poverty
The joy of a strong nature is as cloudless as its suffering is desolate.Collection: Strong
Youth without faith is a day without sun.Collection: Faith
Genius cannot escape the taint of its time more than a child the influence of its begetting.Collection: Children
Christianity has ever been the enemy of human love.Collection: Enemy
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.Collection: Hero
Opposition to a man in love is like oil to fire.Collection: Love
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.Collection: Art
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.Collection: Sweet
Most crimes are sanctioned in some form or other when they take grand names.Collection: Names
Friendship needs to be rooted in respect, but love can live upon itself aloneCollection: Friendship
A great love is an absolute isolation and an absolute absorption.Collection: Love
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.Collection: Wit
Dishonor is like the Aaron's Beard in the hedgerows; it can only poison if it be plucked.Collection: Poison
[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.Collection: Lying
The scorn of genius is the most arrogant and the most boundless of all scorn.Collection: Genius
Music is not a science any more than poetry is. It is a sublime instinct, like genius of all kinds.Collection: Music
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.Collection: Sports
Count art by gold, and it fetters the feet it once winged.Collection: Art
It is only to those who have never lived that death ever can seems beautiful.Collection: Beautiful
What is failure except feebleness? And what is it to miss one's mark except to aim widely and weakly?Collection: Failure
I have met a thousand scamps; but I never met one who considered himself so. Self-knowledge isn't so common.Collection: Self
Humiliation is a guest that only comes to those who have made ready his resting-place, and will give him a fair welcome. ... no one can disgrace you save yourself.Collection: Giving
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.Collection: Lying
Talent wears well, genius wears itself out; talent drives a snug brougham in fact; genius, a sun-chariot in fancy.Collection: Science
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.Collection: Believe
Christianity is a formula: it is nothing more.Collection: Christianity
Christianity ... has produced the iniquities of the Inquisition, the egotism and celibacy of the monasteries, the fury of religious wars, the ferocity of the Hussite, of the Catholic, of the Puritan, of the Spaniard, of the Irish Orangeman and of the Irish Papist; it has divided families, alienated friends, lighted the torch of civil war, and borne the virgin and the greybeard to the burning pile, broken delicate limbs upon the wheel and wrung the souls and bodies of innocent creatures on the rack; all this it has done, and done in the name of God.Collection: Religious
Fancy tortures more people than does realityCollection: Reality
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.Collection: Men
Christianity has ever been the enemy of human love; it has forever cursed and expelled and crucified the one passion which sweetens and smiles on human life, which makes the desert blossom as the rose, and which glorifies the common things and common ways of earth. It made of this, the angel of life, a shape of sin and darkness ... Even in the unions which it reluctantly permitted, it degraded and dwarfed the passion which it could not entirely exclude, and permitted it coarsely to exist for the mere necessity of procreation.Collection: Angel