Emile Zola Quotes - Page 3

The thought is a deed. Of all deeds she fertilizes the world most.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

Sin ought to be something exquisite, my dear boy.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Art is a corner of creation seen through a temperament.

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.

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

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

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!

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.

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.

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

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.

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.