Emile Zola Quotes
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Man's highest duty is to protect animals from cruelty.
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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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Oh, the fools, like a lot of good little schoolboys, scared to death of anything they've been taught is wrong!
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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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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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It is not I who am strong, it is reason, it is truth.
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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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Respectable people... What bastards!
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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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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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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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One must be arrogant, indeed, to imagine that one can take everything in one's hand and know everything!
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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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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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Keep well; that is the half of wisdom and of happiness.
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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 you have a sorrow that is too great it leaves no room for any other.
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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?