thomascog

“All art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“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

“Examinations, sir, are pure humbug from beginning to end. If a man is a gentleman, he knows quite enough, and if he is not a gentleman, whatever he knows is bad for him.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“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