"You'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. It is that permanent contradiction between your ideas and desires and all the dead formalities and vain pretenses of your civilization which makes you sad, troubled and unbalanced. In that intolerable conflict you lose all joy of life and all feeling of personality, because at every moment they suppress and restrain and check the free play of your powers. That's the poisoned and mortal wound of the civilized world."
Quotes by Octave Mirbeau
"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."
Octave MirbeauOctave Henri Marie Mirbeau (French: [ɔktav miʁbo]; 16 February 1848 – 16 February 1917) was a French novelist, art critic, travel writer, pamphleteer, journalist and playwright, who achieved celebrity...
