Quotes from Octave Mirbeau

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

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

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

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

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

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 bombs is in the explosion of stupidity that they provoke.

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

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.

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

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

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.

Monsters, monsters! But there are no monsters! What you call monsters are superior forms, or forms beyond your understanding. Aren't the gods monsters? Isn't a man of genius a monster, like a tiger or a spider, like all individuals who live beyond social lies, in the dazzling and divine immortality of things? Why, I too then-am a monster!

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.

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.

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.

Why, flowers are violent, cruel, terrible, 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.

Alas, the gates of life never swing open except upon death, never open except upon the palaces and gardens of death. And the universe appears to me like an immense, inexorable torture-garden… What I say today, and what I heard, exists and cries and howls beyond this garden, which is no more than a symbol to me of the entire earth.

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.

The Occidental snobbery which is invading us, the gunboats, rapid-fire guns, long-range rifles, explosives... what else? Everything which makes death collective, administrative and bureaucratic - all the filth of your progress, in fact - is destroying, little by little, our beautiful traditions of the past.

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

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—

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