Ouida
Ouida
Ouidawas the pseudonym of the English novelist Maria Louise Ramé...
NationalityEnglish
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth7 January 1839
dream motivation adversity
It is the north wind that lashes men into Vikings; it is the soft, luscious south wind which lulls them to lotus dreams.
joy forever heaven
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
love passion past
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.
joy religion action
Love, the one supreme, unceasing source of human felicity, the one sole joy which lifts the whole mortal existence into the empyrean, was by it [Christianity] degraded into the mere mechanical action of reproduction.
long age youth
Why is youth so short and age so long?
charity delicacy poor
Charity in various guises is an intruder the poor see often; but courtesy and delicacy are visitants with which they are seldom honored.
men blood benefits
A just chastisement may benefit a man, though it seldom does; but an unjust one changes all his blood to gall.
sweet passion race
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 ...
religious war soul-and-body
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.
angel passion rose
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.
hero passion men
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.
wall moving sheep
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.
men optimism looks
Men are always optimists when they look inwards, and pessimists when they look round them.
lying passion long
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.