Emile Zola Quotes
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When people have not the same ideas, it is certainly better not to talk about them.
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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.
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Civilization will not attain to its perfection until the last stone from the last church falls on the last priest.
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Did not one spend the first half of one's days in dreams of happiness and the second half in regrets and terrors?
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A new dynasty is never founded without a struggle. Blood makes good manure.
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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
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Governments are suspicious of literature because it is a force that eludes them.
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I am little concerned with beauty or perfection. I don't care for the great centuries. All I care about is life, struggle, intensity.
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When a peasant begins to feel the need for instruction, he usually becomes fiercely calculating.
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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!
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Sin ought to be something exquisite, my dear boy.
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If you shut up truth and bury it under the ground, it will but grow, and gather to itself such explosive power that the day it bursts through it will blow up everything in its way.
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Nothing develops intelligence like travel.
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Let us eat, drink and satisfy our coarse appetites, but let us keep our souls sacred and apart.
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The camembert with its venison scent defeats the Marolles and Limbourg dull smells; It spreads its exhalation, smothering the other scents under its surprising breath abundance.
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The thought is a deed. Of all deeds she fertilizes the world most.
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Has science ever retreated? No! It is Catholicism which has always retreated before her, and will always be forced to retreat.
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I believe that all is illusion and vanity outside the treasure of truths slowly accumulated, and which will never again be lost. I believe that the sum of these truths, always increasing, will at last confer on man incalculable power and peace, if not happiness. Yes, I believe in the final triumph of life.
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Through the centuries, the history of peoples is but a lesson in mutual tolerance.
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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.
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Paris flared -- Paris, which the divine sun had sown with light, and where in glory waved the great future harvest of Truth and of Justice.
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A god of kindness would be charitable to all. Your god of wrath and punishment is but a monstrous phantasy.
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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.
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An entire lifetime would not be long enough for you to exhaust the glance of the young harvest-girl.