Octave MIRBEAU (1848-1917)
« − What must you seek in life? ... Happiness... And you can only obtain it by exercising your body, which brings health, and by cramming as few ideas as possible into your brain, for ideas disturb rest and always push you toward useless actions — always painful, and often criminal... Not to feel your self, to be an elusive thing, merged into nature, like a drop of water falling from a cloud dissolves into the sea — that shall be the goal of your efforts... »
Octave Mirbeau
L'Abbé Jules,
Part 2, Chapter III,
Œuvre romanesque, volume 1,
Paris, Buchet/Chastel-Société Octave Mirbeau, 2000-2001, p. 470
« My intelligence has been deformed, as has my body, and in place of the natural man, instinctive, bursting with life, they have substituted the artificial puppet, the mechanical doll of civilization, inflated with idealism… the ideal from which were born bankers, priests, swindlers, debauchees, murderers, and the wretched… »
Id., ibid., p. 471.
Mirbeau defender of the child From Mirbeau to Robin
Mirbeau Portal Mirbeau and the school