Oscar Wilde, His Life and Confessions — Volume 1

“[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

“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

“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

“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

“The italics are mine; but the suggestion was always implicit;””

— Frank Harris

“The pleasure men take in denigration of the gifted is one of the puzzles of life””

— Frank Harris

“men of genius stand apart and are laws unto themselves; showed him, too, that all qualities”

— Frank Harris