Octave Mirbeau Quotes (7 Quotes)

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

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

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

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

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.

You're obliged to pretend respect for people and institutions you find absurd. You live attached in a cowardly fashion to moral and social conventions you despise, condemn, and know lack all foundation. It is that permanent contradiction between your ideas and desires and all the dead formalities and vain pretenses of your civilization which makes you sad, troubled and unbalanced. In that intolerable conflict you lose all joy of life and feeling of personality, because at every moment they suppress and restrain and check the free play of your powers. That's the poisoned and mortal wound of the civilized world.

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