The greatest danger of a terrorist's bomb is in the explosion of stupidity that it provokes.
Octave MirbeauWhile 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 MirbeauWoman 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 MirbeauWherever he goes, whatever he does, he will always see that word: murder—immortally inscribed upon the pediment of that vast slaughterhouse—humanity.
Octave MirbeauNature’s constantly screaming with all its shapes and scents: love each other! Love each other! Do as the flowers. There’s only love.
Octave MirbeauDesire can attain the darkest human terror and give an actual ideal of hell and its horror.
Octave MirbeauWhen one tears away the veils and shows them naked, people's souls give off such a pungent smell of decay.
Octave MirbeauChildren, 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 MirbeauThe 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 MirbeauSheep 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 MirbeauYou'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 MirbeauCome now, don't make such a funeral face. It isn't dying that's sad; it's living when you're not happy.
Octave MirbeauTo 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