Best 140 quotes of Emile Zola on MyQuotes

A god of kindness would be charitable to all. Your god of wrath and punishment is but a monstrous phantasy.

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

An entire lifetime would not be long enough for you to exhaust the glance of the young harvest-girl.

A new dynasty is never founded without a struggle. Blood makes good manure.

Art for me...is a negation of society, an affirmation of the individual, outside of all the rules and all the demands of society.

Art is a corner of creation seen through a temperament.

A ruined man fell from her hands like a ripe fruit, to lie rotting on the ground.

Blow the candle out, I don't need to see what my thoughts look like.

Civilization will not attain to its perfection until the last stone from the last church falls on the last priest.

Classical education has deformed everything, and has imposed upon us as geniuses men of correct, facile talent, who follow the beaten track.

Did not one spend the first half of one's days in dreams of happiness and the second half in regrets and terrors?

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.

Every wave is a water sprite who swims in the current, each current is a path which snakes towards my palace, and my palace is fluidly built at the bottom of the lake, in the triangle of earth, fire and water.

From the moment I start a new novel, life's just one endless torture. The first few chapters may go fairly well and I may feel there's still a chance to prove my worth, but that feeling soon disappears and every day I feel less and less satisfied.

Governments are suspicious of literature because it is a force that eludes them.

Has science ever retreated? No! It is Catholicism which has always retreated before her, and will always be forced to retreat.

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!

I am an artist... I am here to live out loud.

I am little concerned with beauty or perfection. I don't care for the great centuries. All I care about is life, struggle, intensity.

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.

If I cannot overwhelm with my quality, I will overwhelm with my quantity.

If people can just love each other a little bit, they can be so happy.

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.

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.

Inability, human incapacity, is the only boundary to an art.

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.

In my view you cannot claim to have seen something until you have photographed it.

In Paris, everything's for sale: wise virgins, foolish virgins, truth and lies, tears and smiles.

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!

It is not necessary that one should humble oneself to deserve assistance, it is sufficient that one should suffer.

Let us eat, drink and satisfy our coarse appetites, but let us keep our souls sacred and apart.

Lovers are made by a kiss.

Man's highest duty is to protect animals from cruelty.

My fiery protest is simply the cry of my very soul.

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.

One forges one's style on the terrible anvil of daily deadlines.

Over all crowds there seems to float a vague distress, an atmosphere of pervasive melancholy, as if any large gathering of people creates an aura of terror and pity.

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.

Perfection is such a nuisance that I often regret having cured myself of using tobacco.

Respectable people... What bastards!

She might have liked to try to strangle him with those slender fingers of hers, but she wanted to make a job of it and this great patience with which she waited for her claws to grow was in itself a form of enjoyment.

She was cold by nature, self-love predominating over passion; rather than being virtuous, she preferred to have her pleasures all to herself.

Since the same human mire remains beneath, does not all civilization reduce itself to the superiority of smelling nice and living well?

Sin ought to be something exquisite, my dear boy.

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.

The day is not far off when one ordinary carrot may be pregnant with revolution.

The fate of animals is of greater importance to me than the fear of appearing ridiculous; it is indissolubly connected with the fate of men.

The past was but the cemetery of our illusions: one simply stubbed one's toes on the gravestones.

There are two men inside the artist, the poet and the craftsman. One is born a poet. One becomes a craftsman.

The road to Lourdes is littered with crutches, but not one wooden leg.