Frank Harris > Quotes

“[Referring to the imprisonment of Oscar Wilde] ... Will civilization never reach humane ideals? Will men always punish most severely the sins they do not understand and which hold forth for them no temptation? Did Jesus suffer in vain?”
― Frank Harris, Oscar Wilde

“Such actions are beyond praise: it is the perfume of such sweet and noble human sympathy that makes this wild beasts' cage a world habitable for men.”
― Frank Harris, Oscar Wilde

“Memory is the mother of the muses, prototype Artist. As a rule picks and highlights what is important, omitting what is accidental or trivial. Occasionally, however, is mistaken as all the other artists. Nevertheless it is what I take as a guide page.”
― Frank Harris, My Life and Loves

“The truth is that the fever of desire in youth is fleeting disease that intimacy promptly cure.”
― Frank Harris, My Life and Loves

“Orang-orang kuat ditempa oleh pelbagai tantangan, seperti layang-layang yang dilambungkan ke langit oleh terpaan angin.”
― Frank Harris

“I will, however, establish that success in love, as in all other aspects of life, belongs, as a rule, to the persistent and fiber man. Chaucer had reason to make the Old Bath confess: 'The truth is, more or less, we always succumb to attention and perseverance'.”
― Frank Harris, My Life and Loves

“What will happen to those who stone the prophets and persecute the masters? His fate is written in flaming letters on each page of the history.”
― Frank Harris, My Life and Loves

“(...) always regretted that good memory often prevents us from thinking for ourselves.”
― Frank Harris, My Life and Loves

“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

“For the first time, vague doubts assaulted me, the shattering suspicion that for all pleasure and joy in life we had to pay ... I repel fear. If I had to pay I would pay, after all, the memory of ecstasy while pungisse its pain could never be erased.”
― Frank Harris, My Life and Loves

“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

“(...) the easiest to conquer were also more worthy of it, because women have better intuition than men for the love affinity.”
― Frank Harris, My Life and Loves

“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

“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

“There are two main traditions of English writing: the one of perfect liberty, that of Chaucer and Shakespeare, completely outspoken, with a certain liking for lascivious details and witty smut, a man’s speech; the other emasculated more and more by Puritanism and since the French Revolution, gelded to tamest propriety; for that upheaval brought the illiterate middle-class to power and insured the domination of girl readers. Under Victoria, English prose literally became half childish, as in stories of «Little Mary,» or at best provincial, as anyone may see who cares to compare the influence of Dickens, Thackeray and Reade in the world with the influence of Balzac, Flaubert and Zola.”
― Frank Harris, My Life and Loves

“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

“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 italics are mine; but the suggestion was always implicit;”
― Frank Harris, Oscar Wilde: His Life and Confessions

“Since Luther we have been living in a centrifugal movement, in a wild individualism where all ties of love and affection have been loosened, and now that the centripetal movement”
― Frank Harris, Oscar Wilde, His Life and Confessions, Vol 2

“[I talked this matter over with Douglas more than once. He did not know French well; but he could understand it and he was a rarely good translator as his version of a Baudelaire sonnet shows. In any dispute as to the value of a word or phrase I should prefer his opinion to Oscar's. But Ross is doubtless right on this point. F.H.]”
― Frank Harris, Oscar Wilde, His Life and Confessions, Vol 2

“«Vae victis ha sido nuestro lema, y los resultados han sido escalofriantes. Es evidente que hemos llegado al fin de una etapa y que debemos pensar en el futuro.

»La religión que ha dirigido, real o supuestamente, nuestra conducta durante diecinueve siglos, ha sido descartada. Hasta el divino espíritu de Cristo fue arrojado lejos por Nietzsche, como quien tira el hacha después del mango o, para usar una mejor analogía alemana, al niño junto con el agua del baño.

»La estúpida moral sexual de Pablo ha desacreditado todo el Evangelio: Pablo era impotente; de hecho alardeaba de no sentir deseos sexuales y deseaba que todos los hombres fuesen como él en este aspecto, del mismo modo que el zorro de la fábula que, habiendo perdido su cola, deseaba que todos los otros zorros fueran mutilados de la misma manera, para alcanzar su perfección...»”
― Frank Harris, My Life and Loves

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

“Strong people are made by opposition like kites that go up against the wind.”
― Frank Harris