44 Quotes by Octave Mirbeau

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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