Best 28 quotes of Octave Mirbeau on MyQuotes

As soon as I find myself in the presence of a rich man, I cannot help looking upon him as an exceptional and beautiful being, as a sort of marvellous divinity, and, in spite of myself, surmounting my will and my reason, I feel rising, from the depths of my being, toward this rich man, who is very often an imbecile, and sometimes a murderer, something like an incense of admiration. Is it not stupid? And why? Why?

Children, by nature, are keen, passionate and curious. What was referred to as laziness is often merely an awakening of sensitivity, a psychological inability to submit to certain absurd duties, and a natural result of the distorted, unbalanced education given to them. This laziness, which leads to an insuperable reluctance to learn, is, contrary to appearances, sometimes proof of intellectual superiority and a condemnation of the teacher.

Come now, don't make such a funeral face. It isn't dying that's sad; it's living when you're not happy.

Desire can attain the darkest human terror and give an actual ideal of hell and its horror.

Great ladies ... are like the best sauces -- it is better not to know how they are made.

Murder is born of love, and love attains the greatest intensity in murder.

Nature’s constantly screaming with all its shapes and scents: love each other! Love each other! Do as the flowers. There’s only love.

Nothing comes at all -- never anything. And I cannot accustom myself to that. It is this monotony, this absolute fixity in life, that is the hardest thing for me to endure. I should like to go away from here. Go away? But where and how? I do not know, and I stay.

Sheep run to the slaughterhouse, silent and hopeless, but at least sheep never vote for the butcher who kills them or the people who devour them. More beastly than any beast, more sheepish than any sheep, the voter names his own executioner and chooses his own devourer, and for this precious "right" a revolution was fought.

Solitude does not consist in living alone; it consists in living with others, with people who take no interest in you.

‎The greatest danger of a terrorist's bomb is in the explosion of stupidity that it provokes.

The poor are the human manure in which grow the harvests of life, the harvests of joy which the rich reap.

The universe appears to me like an immense, inexorable torture-garden…Passions, greed, hatred, and lies; social institutions, justice, love, glory, heroism, and religion: these are its monstrous flowers and its hideous instruments of eternal human suffering.

To take something from a person and keep it for oneself: that is robbery. To take something from one person and then turn it over to another in exchange for as much money as you can get: that is business. Robbery is so much more stupid, since it is satisfied with a single, frequently dangerous profit; whereas in business it can be doubled without danger.

When one tears away the veils and shows them naked, people's souls give off such a pungent smell of decay.

While all is new, all is beautiful. That is a well-known song. Yes, and the next day the air changes into another one equally well known.

While I was an honorable man in her eyes, she did not love me. But the minute she understood what I was, when she breathed the true and foul odor of my soul, love was born in her – for she does love me! Well, well! There is nothing real, then, except evil.

Why, flowers are violent, cruel, terrible and splendid... like love!

Woman possesses the cosmic force of an element, an invincible force of destruction, like nature's. She is, in herself alone, all nature! Being the matrix of life, she is by that very fact the matrix of death - since it is from death that life is perpetually reborn, and since to annihilate death would be to kill life at its only fertile source.

You're obliged to pretend respect for people and institutions you think absurd. You live attached in a cowardly fashion to moral and social conventions you despise, condemn, and know lack all foundation.

But one gets tired of everything, even of abusing a person. Paris abandons its puppets which it raises to the throne as quickly as it does its martyrs whom it hoists on the gibbet; in its perpetual hunger for new playthings, it never gets itself excited overly much before the statues of its heroes or at the sight of the blood of its victims.

C'est que les grands assassins ont toujours été des amoureux terribles... Leur puissance génésique correspond à leur puissance criminelle... Ils aiment comme ils tuent!

Everything she heard, everything she saw seemed to be in disagreement with her own manner of understanding and feeling. To her, the sun did not appear red enough, the nights pale enough, the skies deep enough. Her fleeting conception of things and beings condemned her fatally to a perversion of her senses, to vagaries of the spirit and left her nothing but the torment of an unachieved longing, the torture of unfulfilled desires.

I did not know what she suffered from, but I knew that her malady must have been horrible; I knew that from the way she used to embrace me.

I understood that the law of the world was strife; an inexorable, murderous law, which was not content with arming nation against nation but which hurled against one another the children of the same race, the same family, the same womb. I found none of the lofty abstractions of honor, justice, charity, patriotism of which our standard books are so full, on which we are brought up, with which we are lulled to sleep, through which they hypnotize us in order the better to deceive the kind little folk, to enslave them the more easily, to butcher them the more foully.

To Priests, Soldiers, Judges- to men who rear, lead or govern men I dedicate these pages of murder and blood.

Tp Priests, Soldiers, Judges- to men who rear, lead or govern men I dedicate these pages of murder and blood.

Why did they kill it? Man can't stand to let something beautiful and pure, a thing on wings, pass over him. He hates everything that soars, and everything that sings. It seemed to me this swan is the very image of my dream, and my dream is dead.