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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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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Sin ought to be something exquisite, my dear boy.
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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 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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Let us eat, drink and satisfy our coarse appetites, but let us keep our souls sacred and apart.
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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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Governments are suspicious of literature because it is a force that eludes them.
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Through the centuries, the history of peoples is but a lesson in mutual tolerance.
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When a peasant begins to feel the need for instruction, he usually becomes fiercely calculating.
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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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The thought is a deed. Of all deeds she fertilizes the world most.
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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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The conclusion does not belong to the artist.
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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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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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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!
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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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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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Nothing develops intelligence like travel.
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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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Don't go looking at me like that because you'll wear your eyes out.
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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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Art for me...is a negation of society, an affirmation of the individual, outside of all the rules and all the demands of society.