Octave Mirbeau Quotes

Faces ...I ...don't ...know ...the real ...me

Some people have the disease of criticising all the time. They forget the good about others and only mention their faults. They are like flies that avoid the good and pure places and land on the bad and wounds. This is because of the evil within the self and the spoiled nature.

A sinful heart makes feeble hand.

If God is all-powerful, then the Devil must be nothing more than a darkness in the mind of God. But if the Devil is something real and separate, than perfection is impossible, and there can be no God... except for the aspirations of fallen angels.

Now, men think, with regard to their conduct, that, if they were to lift themselves up gigantically and commit some crashing sin, they should never be able to hold up their heads; but they will harbor in their souls little sins, which are piercing and eating them away to inevitable ruin.

I love you in my dreams, but not in real life.

The worst effect of sin is within and is manifest not in poverty, and pain, and bodily defacement, but in the discrowned faculties, the unworthy love, the low ideal, the brutalized and enslaved spirit.

There exists among the intolerable degraded, the perverse and powerful desire to force into the arena of the actual those fantastic crimes of which they have been accused, achieving their vengeance and their own destruction through making the nightmare real.

Your personality - the real you inside - was the price of beauty.

What the worm was to the corpse, his sins would be to the painted image on the canvas. They would mar its beauty, and eat away its grace. they would defile it, and make it shameful. And yet the thing would still live on. It would be always alive. (Dorian Gray regarding his portrait)

I needed to hate someone and you’re the one I love the most, so it fell on you.

It seems as though I've always been,somebody outside looking in,well, here I am for all of them to bleed,but they can't take my heart from me,and they can't bring me to my knees,they'll never know the real me.

The desire for success lubricates secret prostitution in the soul.

The true Christian's nostril is to be continually attentive to the inner cesspool.

Miss Edmunds was one of his secrets. He was in love with her. Not the kind of silly stuff Ellie and Brenda giggled about on the telephone. This was too real and too deep to talk about, even to think about very much.

But which was the real me? Let me be perfectly honest: I was a man of many faces. (p.33)

Much more wretched than lackof health inthe body, it is to dwell with a soul that is not healthy, but corrupt.

He was always part of her thoughts, and now that he was real, he was inescapably part of her life, but it was as she had told her mother: saying he was part of her or that they were more than friends sounded like love, but it seemed like loss as well. All the words she knew to describe what he was to her were from love stories and love songs, but those were not words anyone truly meant.

A vice in the heart is an idol on the altar.

Half of my heart's got a real good imagination, half of my heart's got you. . .Half of my hearts got a right mind to tell you that half of my heart won't do.

Perfect love is the most beautiful of all frustrations because it is more than one can express.

The real you is not a puppet that life pushes around, the real deep down you is the whole universe.

For all our penny-wisdom, for all our soul-destroying slavery to habit, it is not to be doubted that all men have sublime thoughts; that all men value the few real hours of life; they love to be heard; they love to be caught up into the vision of principles. We mark with light in the memory the few interviews we have had, in the dreary years of routine and of sin, with souls that made our souls wiser; that spoke what we thought; that told us what we knew; that gave us leave to be what we only were.

For nothing is evil in the beginning.

Should I be what I think? But I think about being so many things!