Octave Mirbeau Quotes

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.

There is a diabolical streak in me, a troublesome and inexplicable perversity.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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