Emile Zola Quotes
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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.
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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.
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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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Respectable people... What bastards!
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The only basis for living is believing in life, loving it, and applying the whole force of one's intellect to know it better.
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In love as in speculation there is much filth; in love also, people think only of their own gratification; yet without love there would be no life, and the world would come to an end.
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Keep well; that is the half of wisdom and of happiness.
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One must be arrogant, indeed, to imagine that one can take everything in one's hand and know everything!
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Don't go looking at me like that because you'll wear your eyes out.
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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.
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It is not I who am strong, it is reason, it is truth.
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These young people naturally grow up with ideas different from ours, for they are born for times when we shall no longer be here
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There are two men inside the artist, the poet and the craftsman. One is born a poet. One becomes a craftsman.
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I have but one passion: to enlighten those who have been kept in the dark, in the name of humanity which has suffered so much and is entitled to happiness. My fiery protest is simply the cry of my very soul.
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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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When you have a sorrow that is too great it leaves no room for any other.
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They talked so, with secret hearts, without needing words, talking of other things... They could have suddenly continued their confessions aloud, without ceasing to understand each other.
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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.
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When lovers kiss on the cheeks, it is because they are searching, feeling for one another's lips. Lovers are made by a kiss.
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Since the same human mire remains beneath, does not all civilization reduce itself to the superiority of smelling nice and living well?