Frank Harris Quotes
Frank Harris delivers sharp, philosophical musings on ambition, faith, and the writer's craft.
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Strong men are made by opposition; like kites they go up against the wind.
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Shaw's relations with women have always been gallant, coy even. The number he has surrendered to physically have been few - perhaps not half a dozen in all - the first man to have cut a path through the theatre and left it strewn with virgins.
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My dear Duke, I know nothing of the joys of homo-sexuality. You must speak to my friend Oscar about that. And yet, if Shakespeare had asked me, I would have had to submit.
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Christ goes deeper than I do, but I have had a wider experience.
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Casanova! My dear man, Casanova is not worthy to untie my bootstrings!
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I am, really, a great writer; my only difficulty is in finding great readers.
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Frank Harris has no feelings. It is the secret of his success. Just as the fact that he thinks other people have none either is the secret of the failure that lies in wait for him somewhere on the way of Life.
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The pleasure of being with you is in the clash of personality, the intellectual battle, the war of ideas. To survive you one must have a strong brain, an assertive ego, a dynamic character. In your luncheon-parties, in old days, the remains of the guests were taken away with the debris of the feast. I have often lunched with you in Park Lane and found myself the only survivor.
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Sex is the gateway to life.
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There is a destiny that shapes our ends rough, hew them as we will.
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The Christian churches were offered two things: the spirit of Jesus and the idiotic morality of Paul, and they rejected the higher inspiration... Following Paul, we have turned the goodness of love into a fiend and degraded the crowning impulse of our being into a capital sin.
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All the faults of the age come from Christianity and journalism. Christianity, of course, but why journalism?
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Memoirs are a well-known form of fiction.
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“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.”
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“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'.”
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“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.”
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“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.”
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“[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?”
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“The truth is that the fever of desire in youth is fleeting disease that intimacy promptly cure.”
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“(...) the easiest to conquer were also more worthy of it, because women have better intuition than men for the love affinity.”
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“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.”
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“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.”
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“(...) always regretted that good memory often prevents us from thinking for ourselves.”
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“Orang-orang kuat ditempa oleh pelbagai tantangan, seperti layang-layang yang dilambungkan ke langit oleh terpaan angin.”