Emile Zola Quotes
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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.
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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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An entire lifetime would not be long enough for you to exhaust the glance of the young harvest-girl.
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It is not I who am strong, it is reason, it is truth.
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Respectable people... What bastards!
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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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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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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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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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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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One must be arrogant, indeed, to imagine that one can take everything in one's hand and know everything!
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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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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?