Emile Zola Quotes

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.

If you ask me what I came into this life to do, I will tell you: I came to live out loud.

I would rather die of passion than of boredom.

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

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

Nothing develops intelligence like travel.

Truth is on the march, and nothing will stop it.

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 artist is nothing without the gift, but the gift is nothing without work.

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.

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.

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

If you shut up truth, and bury it underground, it will but grow.

The only basis for living is believing in life, loving it, and applying the whole force of one's intellect to know it better.

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.

Respectable people... What bastards!

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yes! live life with every fibre of one's being, surrender oneself to it, with no thoughts of rebellion, without deluding oneself that one can improve it and render it painless.

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

Violence has never prospered, you can't remake the world in a day. Anyone who promises to change everything for you all at once is either a fool or a rogue!

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.

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.

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

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

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

Sin ought to be something exquisite, my dear boy.

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

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.

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

Why is it that my heart is so touched whenever I meet a dog lost in our noisy streets? Why do I feel such anguished pity when I see one of these creatures coming and going, sniffing everyone, frightened, despairing of even finding its master?

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.

If something's just, I'll let myself be hacked to bits for it.

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

The conclusion does not belong to the artist.

When truth is buried, it grows. It chokes. It gathers such an explosive force that on the day it bursts out, it blows up everything with it.

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

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

Lovers are made by a kiss.

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

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.

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

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

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

These young people naturally grow up with ideas different from ours, for they are born for times when we shall no longer be here

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.