Love & Passion Quote by Ouida

Goodness, in Ouida's telling, isn’t a halo you wear; it’s a muscle that needs calories, safety, and tenderness. The line drags morality down from the pulpit and plants it in the bruised body of a child. “Hard work” is the key provocation: virtue isn’t innate, and it certainly isn’t evenly distributed. It’s labor - made heavier by “very little” and “very hungry,” a pairing that makes moral expectation feel almost obscene. How, exactly, is a starving child supposed to practice patience, restraint, grace?

Ouida’s genius here is the inventory of deprivations. “Many sticks to beat you” is blunt, almost ugly in its specificity; it refuses the tasteful euphemisms that polite society uses to keep cruelty offstage. Then comes the devastating counterweight: “no mother’s lips to kiss you.” She doesn’t say “no love” or “no family,” but a physical, ordinary act of comfort. The sentence is engineered to make punishment feel plentiful and affection scarce - a moral economy rigged from the start.

Context matters: Ouida wrote in a Victorian world that loved moral lessons and often treated poverty as a character flaw. This line is a quiet indictment of that worldview. It suggests that society produces the very “badness” it condemns, then congratulates itself for disciplining the poor rather than feeding them. The subtext is political without sounding like policy: if you want goodness, stop manufacturing hunger and bruises, and start giving children something to lean on besides fear.