Top 100 Zola Quotes
#1. 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
#2. When a peasant begins to feel the need for instruction, he usually becomes fiercely calculating.
Emile Zola
#3. 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
#4. When you sit in America you miss the open plains and you miss the sound of rain and the smell of rain and the smell of the veld. If you're African it's different and I don't think one will ever become an American or British. It doesn't matter where you move, you will always be a South African,
Zola Budd
#5. The fate of animals is of far greater importance to me than the fear of appearing ridiculous.
Emile Zola
#6. I am an artist ... I am here to live out loud.
Emile Zola
#7. I have strong views about South African politics and I still don't feel I need to make public statements.
Zola Budd
#8. 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
#9. The festivity had reached that apogee of joy when you face the happy fate of being crushed to death.
Emile Zola
#10. I can drink tea until the cows come home and I love the atmosphere in tea-shops.
Zola Budd
#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. I think it's one of the most natural things for any human to do is to be able to run because it's that flight or fight reaction you have. You either fight or you run away. It's just a natural way for us to move,
Zola Budd
#20. 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
#21. 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
#22. It was a peaceful, sunny death, a sleep without end in the calm of the countryside.
Emile Zola
#23. 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
#24. Speculation, speculation!' she [Caroline Hamelin] mechanically repeated, struggling with her doubts. 'Ah! the idea of it fills my heart with disturbing anguish.
Emile Zola
#25. 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
#26. 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
#27. After a time, she believed in the reality of this comedy
Emile Zola
#28. 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
#29. He had a thought that amused him. "Figures, still life, landscape, AND an animal! Zola, eat your hat!" he bellowed.
Susan Vreeland
#30. 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
#31. I know nothing sadder than a hunchback in love or an ugly woman full of romantic ideals.
Emile Zola
#32. There were always a couple of loonies who caused all the trouble.
Zola Budd
#33. 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
#35. The only reason I would write a break-up song is because my own problem of allowing myself to relate to people.
Zola Jesus
#36. Nothing develops intelligence like travel.
Emile Zola
#37. Tea-shops were to become my favourite haunts in England.
Zola Budd
#38. I don't know why people think I'm a Goth - that's a misconception.
Zola Jesus
#39. 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
#40. I think I'm making music that's pretty universal.
Zola Jesus
#41. 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
#42. The day is not far off when one ordinary carrot may be pregnant with revolution.
Emile Zola
#43. The truth is on the march and nothing will stop it.
Emile Zola
#44. The greatest benefit of being a solo performer is that it is seriously frightening, but at the same time very empowering. It's just you and the audience. All the weight is on you to deliver the songs.
Zola Jesus
#45. It is not I who am strong, it is reason, it is truth.
Emile Zola
#46. Man's highest duty is to protect animals from cruelty.
Emile Zola
#47. 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
#48. 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
#49. 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
#50. Nothing could be more heart rending than this mute and motionless dispair
Emile Zola
#51. 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
#52. 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
#53. Do something. Anything. You're alive, and you'll only be for a few decades, and then it's done. You'll be in the ground, worm food. Make something and don't let fear consume you.
Gianfranco Zola
#54. 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
#55. 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
#56. I like people like Robert De Niro and Anthony Hopkins. And Gianfranco Zola, who played for Chelsea and Italy. He's an artist with his feet.
Phil Daniels
#57. When younger, he had been fun-loving to the point of tedium.
Emile Zola
#58. A new dynasty is never founded without a struggle. Blood makes good manure.
Emile Zola
#59. The couple fell one atop of the other, struck down, finding consolation, at last, in death.
Emile Zola
#60. Respectable people... What bastards!
Emile Zola
#61. She hasn't run faster than herself before
Zola Budd
#62. True expression is hard when performing opera. The problem is that opera relies on the dramatic context of the piece. It can be interpreted and represented, but there are guidelines; there is a vocabulary within the pieces that you must know objectively and reflect.
Zola Jesus
#64. Inability, human incapacity, is the only boundary to an art.
Emile Zola
#65. 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
#66. 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
#67. 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
#68. ...it was absurd to have killed a man for nothing...
Emile Zola
#69. 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
#70. The artist is nothing without the gift, but the gift is nothing without work.
Emile Zola
#71. As a Chelsea fan I always want the team to be in the best possible hands, as they are right now with Roberto Di Matteo.
Gianfranco Zola
#72. 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
#73. I guess something people wouldn't expect me to listen to are artists like Alicia Keys. But she is so incredibly talented. She has this huge voice and great work ethic, which I really respect in an artist. She is also very humble and gracious and devoted to her skill.
Zola Jesus
#74. 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
#75. People don't really understand who I am. They always think that I'm very dark or depressed, but it couldn't be further from the truth!
Zola Jesus
#77. When you have a sorrow that is too great it leaves no room for any other.
Emile Zola
#78. I found them uncomfortable and after that I decided to continue running barefoot because I found it more comfortable. I felt more in touch with what was happening - I could actually feel the track.
Zola Budd
#79. 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
#80. 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
#81. Everything I do is a reflection of the duality within me. Musically, I really love things that are very synthetic and unnatural. And I also like the organic and human ... the intrinsic, I guess.
Zola Jesus
#82. 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
#83. 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
#84. I started performing opera when I was 10 years old. I didn't perform as Zola Jesus until I was probably 18.
Zola Jesus
#85. When there is no hope in the future, the present appears atrociously bitter.
Emile Zola
#86. 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
#87. Perfection is such a nuisance that I often regret having cured myself of using tobacco.
Emile Zola
#88. One forges one's style on the terrible anvil of daily deadlines.
Emile Zola
#89. Zola Budd: so small, so waif-like, you literally can't see her. But there she is
Alan Parry
#90. 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
#91. 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
#92. The past was but the cemetery of our illusions: one simply stubbed one's toes on the gravestones.
Emile Zola
#93. 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
#94. Blow the candle out, I don't need to see what my thoughts look like.
Emile Zola
#95. As a child, I was always making sound; it was a compulsion. I loved to scream and yell and sing; it freed me from all the thoughts in my head. I begged for opera lessons because opera singing is the most formidable, most emotional way to use your voice.
Zola Jesus
#96. Governments are suspicious of literature because it is a force that eludes them.
Emile Zola
#97. Don't go looking at me like that because you'll wear your eyes out.
Emile Zola
#98. He [Stanley Matthews] told me that he used to play for just twenty pounds a week. Today he would be worth all the money in the Bank of England.
Gianfranco Zola
#99. 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
#100. 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
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