Top 100 Quotes About Emile Zola
#1. Emile Zola was a poor student at his school at Aix. We are all so different largely because we all have different combinations of intelligences. If we recognize this, I think we will have at least a better chance of dealing appropriately with many problems that we face in the world.
Howard Gardner
#2. Fiction about mining has a long tradition - Emile Zola's 'Germinal' and Upton Sinclair's 'King Coal' come to mind - and most readers will be aware of the industry's harsh conditions.
Floyd Skloot
#3. I'm a huge Emile Zola fan, and when Bill Gallagher said he was writing a new character for 'The Paradise' and had me in mind for the role, I knew I wanted to play Tom Weston before I'd even read a word of the script.
Ben Daniels
#4. 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.
Emile Zola
#5. When a peasant begins to feel the need for instruction, he usually becomes fiercely calculating.
Emile Zola
#6. 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.
Emile Zola
#7. The fate of animals is of far greater importance to me than the fear of appearing ridiculous.
Emile Zola
#8. I am an artist ... I am here to live out loud.
Emile Zola
#9. With other women he had not been able to touch their flesh without experiencing the desire to devour it, as though ravenous with an abominable hunger to butcher them. But this one, could he then love her, and not kill her?
Emile Zola
#10. The festivity had reached that apogee of joy when you face the happy fate of being crushed to death.
Emile Zola
#11. She [Nana] listened to his [Steiner's] propositions, turning them down every time with a shake of the head and that provocative laughter which is peculiar to full-bodied blondes.
Emile Zola
#12. The thought is a deed. Of all deeds she fertilizes the world most.
Emile Zola
#13. Why then should money be blamed for all the dirt and crimes it causes? For is love less filthy
love which creates life?
Emile Zola
#14. Like certain devotees, who think they can fool God and wrest a pardon by paying lip-service to prayer and adopting the humble attitude of the penitent, Therese humiliated herself, beat her chest, found words of repentance, without having anything in the bottom of her heart except fear and cowardice.
Emile Zola
#15. The Empire was on the point of turning Paris into the bawdy house of Europe. The gang of fortune-seekers who had succeeded in stealing a throne required a reign of adventures, shady transactions, sold consciences, bought women, and rampant drunkenness.
Emile Zola
#16. The more grievous the sin, the greater the repentance, God was bidding His time.
Emile Zola
#17. Hortense and Berthe nodded, as though profoundly impressed by the wisdom of their mother's pronouncements. She had long since convinced them of the absolute inferiority of men, whose sole function was to marry and to pay.
Emile Zola
#18. If I cannot overwhelm with my quality, I will overwhelm with my quantity.
Emile Zola
#19. The only basis for living is believing in life, loving it, and applying the whole force of one's intellect to know it better.
Emile Zola
#20. 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.
Emile Zola
#21. It was a peaceful, sunny death, a sleep without end in the calm of the countryside.
Emile Zola
#22. He [Maxime] was twenty, and already there was nothing left to surprise or disgust him. He had certainly dreamt of the most extreme forms of debauchery. Vice with him was not an abyss, as with certain old men, but a natural, external growth.
Emile Zola
#23. Speculation, speculation!' she [Caroline Hamelin] mechanically repeated, struggling with her doubts. 'Ah! the idea of it fills my heart with disturbing anguish.
Emile Zola
#24. Did not one spend the first half of one's days in dreams of happiness and the second half in regrets and terrors?
Emile Zola
#25. These young people naturally grow up with ideas different from ours, for they are born for times when we shall no longer be here
Emile Zola
#26. After a time, she believed in the reality of this comedy
Emile Zola
#27. The passion for defiling things was inborn in her. It was not enough for her to destroy them, she had to soil them too.
Emile Zola
#28. She wanted to live, and live fully, and to give life, she who loved life! What was the good of existing, if you couldn't give yourself?
Emile Zola
#29. I know nothing sadder than a hunchback in love or an ugly woman full of romantic ideals.
Emile Zola
#30. With his mouth open, he gave off that alcoholic smell that you get from an old brandy cask when you take out the bung.
Emile Zola
#31. Nothing develops intelligence like travel.
Emile Zola
#32. She was cold by nature, self-love predominating over passion; rather than being virtuous, she preferred to have her pleasures all to herself.
Emile Zola
#33. For Zola, as for Huysmans, nature itself is uncanny because it is the domain of the feminine, a domain that is constitutionally defective, lacking, even pathological.
Charles Bernheimer
#34. The day is not far off when one ordinary carrot may be pregnant with revolution.
Emile Zola
#35. The truth is on the march and nothing will stop it.
Emile Zola
#36. It is not I who am strong, it is reason, it is truth.
Emile Zola
#37. Man's highest duty is to protect animals from cruelty.
Emile Zola
#38. He [Muffat] experienced a sense of pleasure mingled with remorse, the sort of pleasure peculiar to those Catholics whom the fear of hell spurs on to commit sin.
Emile Zola
#39. On a pitch black, starless night, a solitary man was trudging along the main road from Marchiennes to Montsou, ten kilometres of cobblestones running straight as a die across the bare plain between fields of beet.
Emile Zola
#40. She made one instinctive effort to resist and then yielded, slipping down on to the floor. Not a single word was exchanged. The act was silent and brutal
Emile Zola
#41. Nothing could be more heart rending than this mute and motionless dispair
Emile Zola
#42. For a few moments, raising his arms desperately, the Reverend Mouret implored Heaven. His shoulder-blades cracked, with such fantastic force did he pray. But soon enough his arms fell to his sides, his hopes abashed. From heaven came one of those silences utterly void of hope known to the devout.
Emile Zola
#43. 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.
Emile Zola
#44. They have so smothered me in their middle-class refinement that I don't know how there can be any blood left in my veins. I lowered my eyes, put on a dismal, silly expression, just like them; I was just as dead-and-alive as they were.
Emile Zola
#45. 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.
Emile Zola
#46. When younger, he had been fun-loving to the point of tedium.
Emile Zola
#47. A new dynasty is never founded without a struggle. Blood makes good manure.
Emile Zola
#48. The couple fell one atop of the other, struck down, finding consolation, at last, in death.
Emile Zola
#49. Respectable people... What bastards!
Emile Zola
#51. Inability, human incapacity, is the only boundary to an art.
Emile Zola
#52. 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.
Emile Zola
#53. As he talked a good deal, had seen active service, and was naturally regarded as a man of energy and spirit, he was much sought after and listened to by simpletons.
Emile Zola
#54. Her son would be incomparably handsome, good and powerful. He would be the expected Messiah; it is fortunate for humanity that all mothers have this pathetic faith, without it mankind would not have the ever-renascent strength to go on living.
Emile Zola
#55. ...it was absurd to have killed a man for nothing...
Emile Zola
#56. Men were springing up, a black avenging host was slowly germinating in the furrows, thrusting upward for the harvests of future ages. And very soon their germination would crack the earth asunder.
Emile Zola
#57. The artist is nothing without the gift, but the gift is nothing without work.
Emile Zola
#58. 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.
Emile Zola
#59. 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.
Emile Zola
#61. When you have a sorrow that is too great it leaves no room for any other.
Emile Zola
#62. But his doubts were again coming back to him; when you needed a miracle to gain belief, it means that you are incapable of believing. There is no need for the Almighty to prove His existence.
Emile Zola
#63. She was a virgin and a warrior, disdainful of the male, which was what eventually convinced people that she really must be off her head.
Emile Zola
#64. 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.
Emile Zola
#65. Monsieur Josserand died very quietly - a victim of his own honesty. He had lived a useless life, and he went off, worthy to the last, weary of all the petty things in life, done to death by the heartless conduct of the only human beings that he had ever loved.
Emile Zola
#66. When there is no hope in the future, the present appears atrociously bitter.
Emile Zola
#67. 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.
Emile Zola
#68. Perfection is such a nuisance that I often regret having cured myself of using tobacco.
Emile Zola
#69. One forges one's style on the terrible anvil of daily deadlines.
Emile Zola
#70. No, the only good in life lay in not being - or, if one had to be, then in being a tree, a stone, or even less than that, the grain of sand that cannot bleed beneath the grinding heel of a passer-by.
Emile Zola
#71. The past was but the cemetery of our illusions: one simply stubbed one's toes on the gravestones.
Emile Zola
#72. There's only one thing that warms my heart, and that is the thought that we are going to sweep away these bourgeois.
Emile Zola
#73. Blow the candle out, I don't need to see what my thoughts look like.
Emile Zola
#74. Governments are suspicious of literature because it is a force that eludes them.
Emile Zola
#75. Don't go looking at me like that because you'll wear your eyes out.
Emile Zola
#76. O Almighty God, O Divinity, Helpful Power, whoever, whatever Thou mayst be, take pity upon poor mankind and make human suffering cease! All
Emile Zola
#77. All his [Laurent's] great powerful body wanted was to do nothing, to wallow in never-ending idleness and self-indulgence. He would have liked to eat well, sleep well, satisfy his passions liberally, without stirring from one spot or risking the misfortune of a bit of fatigue.
Emile Zola
#78. But you said so yourself,the poor lass will die of it...Do you really want her to die?
'Yes, I'd rather she died than have a bad life.
Emile Zola
#79. such a strange look of repugnance and horror
Emile Zola
#80. The conclusion does not belong to the artist.
Emile Zola
#81. 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.
Emile Zola
#82. 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!
Emile Zola
#83. The Revolution of 1848 found all the Rougons on the lookout, frustrated by their bad luck, and ready to use any means necessary to advance their cause. They were a family of bandits lying in wait, ready to plunder and steal.
Emile Zola
#84. Never subject to the rules, believing that the correct judgement and healthy nature keep her in the honesty she lived in.
Emile Zola
#85. Sin ought to be something exquisite, my dear boy.
Emile Zola
#87. 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.
Emile Zola
#88. 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!
Emile Zola
#89. Since the same human mire remains beneath, does not all civilization reduce itself to the superiority of smelling nice and living well?
Emile Zola
#90. Let us eat, drink and satisfy our coarse appetites, but let us keep our souls sacred and apart.
Emile Zola
#91. If people can just love each other a little bit, they can be so happy.
Emile Zola
#92. She [Sidonie Rougon] never spoke of her husband, nor of her childhood, her family, or her personal concerns. There was only one thing she never sold, and that was herself.
Emile Zola
#93. 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?
Emile Zola
#94. The vague torment of ... ambition.
Emile Zola
#95. The road to Lourdes is littered with crutches, but not one wooden leg.
Emile Zola
#96. I do not despair in the least of ultimate triumph. I repeat it with intense conviction.
Emile Zola
#97. It was at times like this that one of those waves of bestiality ran through the mine, the sudden lust of the male that came over a miner when he met one of these girls on all fours, with her rear in the air and her buttocks busting out of her breeches.
Emile Zola
#98. Jean-Louis had never had a day's illness in his life. He was tall and as gnarled as an oak. The sun had baked his skin until it had the colour and toughness and stillness of a tree. With advancing years, he had lost his tongue. He now never spoke, considering such an activity pointless.
Emile Zola
#99. In Paris, everything's for sale: wise virgins, foolish virgins, truth and lies, tears and smiles.
Emile Zola
#100. The obligation of a writer is to live out loud.
Emile Zola
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