Emile Zola Quotes - Page 2

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?

Lovers are made by a kiss.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

The vague torment of ... ambition.

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

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

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

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