The whole story is charged with tragic pathos and unforgettable lessons.

I have waited for more than ten years hoping that some one would write about him in this spirit and leave me free to do other things, but nothing such as I propose has yet appeared.
Oscar Wilde was greater as a talker, in my opinion, than as a writer, and no fame is more quickly evanescent.

If I do not tell his story and paint his portrait, it seems unlikely that anyone else will do it.
English "strachery" may accuse me of attacking morality: the accusation is worse than absurd.

The very foundations of this old world are moral: the charred ember itself floats about in space, moves and has its being in obedience to inexorable law.

The thinker may define morality: the reformer may try to bring our notions of it into nearer accord with the fact: human love and pity may seek to soften its occasional injustices and mitigate its intolerable harshness: but that is all the freedom we mortals enjoy, all the breathing-space allotted to us.
In this book the reader will find the figure of the Prometheus-artist clamped, so to speak, with bands of steel to the huge granitic cliff of English puritanism.