Octave Mirbeau Quotes

20 Sourced Quotes

The greatest danger of bombs is in the explosion of stupidity that they provoke.

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

Octave Mirbeau
Look how during Earth's long centuries societies have risen and fallen, all alike in this one fact which rules all history: the great are protected, the small are crushed.

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

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

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

Octave Mirbeau
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.

Octave Mirbeau
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.

Octave Mirbeau
Flowers do not indulge in sentiment. They indulge in passion, nothing but passion. They make love all the time.

Octave Mirbeau
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.

Octave Mirbeau
Schools are miniature universes. They encompass, on a child's scale, the same kind of domination and repression as the most despotically organised societies. A similar sort of injustice and comparable baseness preside over their choice of idols to elevate and martyrs to torment.

Octave Mirbeau
The worship of money is the lowest of all human emotions, but it is shared not only by the bourgeoisie, but also by the great majority of us… Little people, humble people, even those who are practically penniless. And I, with all my indignation, all my passion for destruction, I, too, am not free of it. I who am oppressed by wealth, who realize it to be the source of all misery, all my vices and hatred, all the bitterest humiliations that I have to suffer, all my impossible dreams and all the endless torment of my existence, still, all the time, as soon as I find myself in the presence of a rich person, I cannot help looking up to him, as some exceptional and splendid being, a kind of marvelous divinity, and in spite of myself, stronger than either my will of my reason, I feel rising from the very depths of my being, a sort of incense of admiration for this wealthy creature, who is all too often as stupid as he is pitiless. Isn't it crazy? And why... why?

Octave Mirbeau
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.

Octave Mirbeau
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.

Octave Mirbeau
[Gauguin's] art is strangely cerebral and passionate, uneven still, but poignant and superb in its very unevenness. A sorrowful work, for to understand it, to feel the shock of it, we ourselves must know sorrow and the irony of sorrow, which is the threshold of mystery. It sometimes rises to the height of the mystical act of faith; sometimes it obliterates itself and grimaces in the gloom of doubt. It always emanates the bitter and violent aroma of the poisons of the flesh.

Octave Mirbeau
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.

Octave Mirbeau
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.

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

Octave Mirbeau
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.

Octave Mirbeau
Wherever he goes, whatever he does, he will always see that word: murder—immortally inscribed upon the pediment of that vast slaughterhouse—humanity.

Octave Mirbeau