The Torture Garden

What else do you do except to lie, to lie to yourself and to others, and to lie to everything which, in the depths if your heart you know to be the truth. You are obliged to feign an outward respect for persons and institutions you find absurd. You remain timidly attached to moral or social conventions which you despise and condemn and which you know have no justification at all. It's the permanent contradiction between your ideas, your desires and all the dead forms and vain pretences of your civilisation which makes you sad, troubled and imbalanced. In this unbearable conflict you lose all your joy of life and all feeling of personality because at every minute the free play of your instincts is being constricted, impeded, and stopped - Mirbeau