Octave Mirbeau Quotes

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

Octave Mirbeau

#2. 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.

Octave Mirbeau

#3. In that atrocious second I understood that desire can attain the darkest human terror and give an actual idea of hell and its horror.

Octave Mirbeau

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

Octave Mirbeau

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

Octave Mirbeau

#6. I desire her and I hate her. I would like to take her in my arms and embrace her till she smothered, till she was crushed and I could drink death from her gushing veins.

Octave Mirbeau

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

Octave Mirbeau

#8. I was thinking of love,' I replied in a tone of reproach, 'and here you are talking to me again - forever - about torture!'
'Doubtless! since it's the same thing -

Octave Mirbeau

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

Octave Mirbeau

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

Octave Mirbeau

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

Octave Mirbeau

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

Octave Mirbeau

#13. 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

#14. Why, flowers are violent, cruel, terrible, splendid ... like love.

Octave Mirbeau

#15. Yes, there are some backs on the street
which cry for the knife.

Octave Mirbeau

#16. 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

#17. 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

#18. 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.

Octave Mirbeau

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

Octave Mirbeau

#20. Look here, before you and around you! There is not a grain of sand that has not been bathed in blood, and what is that grain of sand itself, if not the dust of death? But how rich this blood is, and how fertile is the dust!

Octave Mirbeau

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

Octave Mirbeau

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

Octave Mirbeau