While all is new, all is beautiful. That is a well-known song. Yes, and the next day the air changes into another one equally well known.

Man is nothing but surprise, contradiction, incoherence, and folly.

I passionately scrutinize this past, in order to reconstruct from its scattered bits the illusion of a future.

If you really wish to become a man of society, you must learn first either to be an imbecile or to hold your tongue.

Habit, like a fog, tends to palliate things and beings. Little by little it obscures the features of a face and rubs down deformities; if you live with a humpback day in and day out, after a time he loses his hump.

The press is the great modern force ... the great educator ... the universal consciousness ... She denounces ... judges and condemns.

As soon as I find myself in the presence of a rich man, I cannot help looking upon him as an exceptional and beautiful being, as a sort of marvellous divinity, and, in spite of myself, surmounting my will and my reason, I feel rising, from the depths of my being, toward this rich man, who is very often an imbecile, and sometimes a murderer, something like an incense of admiration. Is it not stupid? And why? Why?

For my part I feel an immense and imperative need of that pure embrace, of that chaste kiss, which is no longer the savage bite of the flesh, but the ideal caress of the soul.

By a simple wave of the wand of that miraculous fairy, kindness, there came instantly an end to the recollection of my past humiliations and a conception of all the duties laid upon me by the dignity that belongs to a human being, and at last vouchsafed to me.

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

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.

Oh! how disappointing are these ways leading to the unknown! One goes on and on, and it is always the same thing. See that sparkling horizon yonder. It is blue, it is pink, it is fresh, it is as light and luminous as a dream. It must be fine to live there. You approach, you arrive. There is nothing. Sand, pebbles, hills as dismal as walls. There is nothing else. And above this sand, these pebbles, these hills, there is a grey, opaque, heavy sky -- a sky which kills the day, and whose light weeps dirty tears. There is nothing -- nothing of that which one is looking for. Moreover, I do not know what I am looking for; and neither do I know who I am.

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

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

A chambermaid with her wits about her and a good pair of eyes knows perfectly well what goes on between her employers. She doesn't even need to listen at the door; the bathroom, the bedroom, the bedding and so many other things tell her everything. It's unbelievable how people make almost no effort to hide the signs of their dirty pleasures, yet at the same time they'll lecture others on morality, and insist on their servants being on their best behavior at all times.

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

OCTAVE MIRBEAU, "Pour Jean Grave", Le Journal, February 19, 1894

People meet; that is well. They part; that is well, too. Life is life.