44 Quotes by Octave Mirbeau

Why did they kill it? Man can't stand to let something beautiful and pure, a thing on wings, pass over him. He hates everything that soars, and everything that sings. It seemed to me this swan is the very image of my dream, and my dream is dead.

C'est que les grands assassins ont toujours été des amoureux terribles... Leur puissance génésique correspond à leur puissance criminelle... Ils aiment comme ils tuent!

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

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.

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.

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

Think what it must be like for a victim about to die under torture. Think how the torture must be multiplied in his flesh and soul with the splendour that surrounds him! And how his agony must become more atrocious, more desperately atrocious, dearest heart!”“I was thinking about love,” I replied reproachfully. “And you continuously talk about torture!”“Why not - since it’s the same thing!

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.

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