To vice, innocence must always seem only a superior kind of chicanery.
—Ouida (Maria Louise Rame)
Topics: Innocence
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 (Maria Louise Rame)
Topics: Sports
Take hope from the heart of man and you make him a beast of prey.
—Ouida (Maria Louise Rame)
Topics: Hope, Aspirations
Familiarity is a magician that is cruel to beauty but kind to ugliness.
—Ouida (Maria Louise Rame)
Topics: Familiarity, Knowledge
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 (Maria Louise Rame)
Topics: Animals
The longest absence is less perilous to love than the terrible trials of incessant proximity.
—Ouida (Maria Louise Rame)
Topics: Absence
Petty laws breed great crimes.
—Ouida (Maria Louise Rame)
Topics: Lawyers, Law
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.
—Ouida (Maria Louise Rame)
A cruel story runs on wheels, and every hand oils the wheels as they run.
—Ouida (Maria Louise Rame)
Topics: Gossip
The loss of our illusions is the only loss from which we never recover.
—Ouida (Maria Louise Rame)
Topics: Illusion
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