Emile Zola Quotes

When sometimes, behind his back, they called him a tyrant, he merely smiled and uttered this profound observation: If some day I turn liberal, they will say I have let them down.

The fate of animals is of greater importance to me than the fear of appearing ridiculous; it is indissolubly connected with the fate of men.

Inability, human incapacity, is the only boundary to an art.

One forges one's style on the terrible anvil of daily deadlines.

Did science promise happiness? I do not believe it. It promised truth, and the question is to know if we will ever make happiness with truth.

Let us eat, drink and satisfy our coarse appetites, but let us keep our souls sacred and apart.

I am spending delightful afternoons in my garden, watching everything living around me. As I grow older, I feel everything departing, and I love everything with more passion.

The thought is a deed. Of all deeds she fertilizes the world most.

Art is a corner of creation seen through a temperament.

I would rather die of passion than of boredom.

It is not I who am strong, it is reason, it is truth.

If you shut up truth, and bury it underground, it will but grow.

Respectable people... What bastards!

Perfection is such a nuisance that I often regret having cured myself of using tobacco.

It all seemed a hollow sham now - that strict code, that conscientious virtue that condemned her to the sterile joys of pious women! No, no, she'd had enough of that; she wanted to live!

The day is not far off when one ordinary carrot may be pregnant with revolution.

If you ask me what I came into this life to do, I will tell you: I came to live out loud.

And that wreched creature without hands or feet, who had to be put to bed and fed like a child, that pitiable remnant of a man, whose almost vanished life was nothing more than one scream of pain, cried out in furious indignation: 'What a fool one must be to go and kill oneself!' " - 'Joy of Life

Civilization will not attain to its perfection until the last stone from the last church falls on the last priest.

When lovers kiss on the cheeks, it is because they are searching, feeling for one another's lips. Lovers are made by a kiss.

Through the centuries, the history of peoples is but a lesson in mutual tolerance.

How evil life must be if it were indeed necessary that such imploring cries, such cries of physical and moral wretchedness, should ever and ever ascend to heaven!

Has science ever retreated? No! It is Catholicism which has always retreated before her, and will always be forced to retreat.

Blow the candle out, I don't need to see what my thoughts look like.

When truth is buried, it grows. It chokes. It gathers such an explosive force that on the day it bursts out, it blows up everything with it.

If I cannot overwhelm with my quality, I will overwhelm with my quantity.

Oh, that's typical of you modern young men; you've nibbled at science and it's made you ill, because you've not been able to satisfy that old craving for the absolute that you absorbed in your nurseries. You'd like science to give you all the answers at one go, whereas we're only just beginning to understand it, and it'll probably never be anything but an eternal quest. And so you repudiate science, you fall back on religion, and religion won't have you any more. Then you relapse into pessimism...Yes, it's the disease of our age, of the end of the century: you're all inverted Werthers.

In my view you cannot claim to have seen something until you have photographed it.

There are two men inside the artist, the poet and the craftsman. One is born a poet. One becomes a craftsman.

Nothing develops intelligence like travel.

Sin ought to be something exquisite, my dear boy.

It was always the same; other people gave up loving before she did. They got spoilt, or else they went away; in any case, they were partly to blame. Why did it happen so? She herself never changed; when she loved anyone, it was for life. She could not understand desertion; it was something so huge, so monstrous that the notion of it made her little heart break.

Art for me...is a negation of society, an affirmation of the individual, outside of all the rules and all the demands of society.

Man's highest duty is to protect animals from cruelty.

Truth is on the march, and nothing will stop it.

An entire lifetime would not be long enough for you to exhaust the glance of the young harvest-girl.

I am little concerned with beauty or perfection. I don't care for the great centuries. All I care about is life, struggle, intensity.

She was cold by nature, self-love predominating over passion; rather than being virtuous, she preferred to have her pleasures all to herself.

The artist is nothing without the gift, but the gift is nothing without work.

If people can just love each other a little bit, they can be so happy.

She might have liked to try to strangle him with those slender fingers of hers, but she wanted to make a job of it and this great patience with which she waited for her claws to grow was in itself a form of enjoyment.

These young people naturally grow up with ideas different from ours, for they are born for times when we shall no longer be here

The vague torment of ... ambition.

They dared not peer down into their own natures, down into the feverish confusion that filled their minds with a kind of dense, acrid mist.

Don't go looking at me like that because you'll wear your eyes out.

Did not one spend the first half of one's days in dreams of happiness and the second half in regrets and terrors?

I am an artist... I am here to live out loud.

The word realist means nothing to me, because I would subordinate reality to temperament. Give me what is true and I applaud; but give me what is individual and alive and I applaud even more.