Top 94 Quotes & Sayings by Emile Zola - Page 2

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.

When lovers kiss on the cheeks, it is because they are searching, feeling for one another's lips. Lovers are made by a kiss.

The vague torment of ... ambition.

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!

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

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

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.

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.

Oh, the fools, like a lot of good little schoolboys, scared to death of anything they've been taught is wrong!

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

I do not despair in the least of ultimate triumph. I repeat it with intense conviction.

Through the centuries, the history of peoples is but a lesson in mutual tolerance.

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

Why then should money be blamed for all the dirt and crimes it causes? For is love less filthy -- love which creates life?

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

Sin ought to be something exquisite, my dear boy.

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.

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.

Art is a corner of creation seen through a temperament.

What will be the death of me are buillabaisses, food spiced with pimiento, shellfish, and a load of exquisite rubbish which I eat in disproportionate quantities.

When a peasant begins to feel the need for instruction, he usually becomes fiercely calculating.

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.

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.

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!

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

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

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.