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 …

- Octave Mirbeau

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

- Octave Mirbeau

You're obliged to pretend respect for people and institutions you think absurd. You live attached in a cowardly fashion to moral and social conventio…

- Octave Mirbeau

Children, by nature, are keen, passionate and curious. What was referred to as laziness is often merely an awakening of sensitivity, a psychological …

- Octave Mirbeau

Sheep 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. Mor…

- Octave Mirbeau

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

- 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.

- Octave Mirbeau

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

- Octave Mirbeau

The universe appears to me like an immense, inexorable torture-garden…Passions, greed, hatred, and lies; social institutions, justice, love, glory, h…

- Octave Mirbeau