Oscar Wilde, His Life and Confessions, Vol 1 Quotes

“There are special reasons, too, why I should handle this story. Oscar Wilde was a friend of mine for many years: I could not help prizing him to the very end: he was always to me a charming, soul-animating influence. He was dreadfully punished by men utterly his inferiors: ruined, outlawed, persecuted till Death itself came as a deliverance.”
― Frank Harris, Oscar Wilde, His Life and Confessions, Vol 1

“But no one will understand Oscar Wilde who for a moment loses sight of the fact that he was a pagan born: as Gautier says, "One for whom the visible world alone exists," endowed with all the Greek sensuousness and love of plastic beauty; a pagan, like Nietzsche and Gautier, wholly out of sympathy with Christianity, one of "the Confraternity of the faithless who "cannot" believe," (His own words in "De Profundis.") to whom a sense of sin and repentance are symptoms of weakness and disease.”
― Frank Harris, Oscar Wilde, His Life and Confessions, Vol 1

“He was dreadfully punished by men utterly his inferiors: ruined, outlawed, persecuted till Death itself came as a deliverance. His sentence impeaches his judges.”
― Frank Harris, Oscar Wilde, His Life and Confessions, Vol 1

“it is self-denial and abstinence that maim and deform the soul.”
― Frank Harris, Oscar Wilde, His Life and Confessions, Vol 1

“Modern art he felt should be an interpretation and not a representment of reality, and he taught the golden rule of the artist that the half is usually more expressive than the whole.”
― Frank Harris, Oscar Wilde, His Life and Confessions, Vol 1

“He was an intense admirer of Swinburne and constantly reading his poems; John Addington Symond's works too, on the Greek authors, were perpetually in his hands. He never entertained any pronounced views on social, religious or political questions while in College; he seemed to be altogether devoted to literary matters.”
― Frank Harris, Oscar Wilde, His Life and Confessions, Vol 1

“The pleasure men take in denigration of the gifted is one of the puzzles of life”
― Frank Harris, Oscar Wilde, His Life and Confessions, Vol 1

“men of genius stand apart and are laws unto themselves; showed him, too, that all qualities—singularity of appearance, wit, rudeness even, count doubly in a democracy.”
― Frank Harris, Oscar Wilde, His Life and Confessions, Vol 1