Quotes from Ouida

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.

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

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

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

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

Love is cruel as the grave.

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

Christianity has ever been the enemy of human love.

What we love once, we love forever. Shall there be joy in heaven over those who repent, yet no forgiveness for them upon earth?--"Wanda

What is it that love does to a woman? Without it, she only sleeps; with it alone, she lives.

The longest absence is less perilous to love than the terrible trials of incessant proximity.

Fame has only the span of the day, they say. But to live in the hearts of people-that is worth something.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

you have not a boat of your own, that is just it; that is what women always suffer from; they have to steer, but the craft is some one else's, and the haul too.

Woman's fatal weakness is to desire sympathy and comprehension.--"Wanda

Why is youth so short and age so long?

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.

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.

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