Émile Zola Quotes

“A god of kindness would be charitable to all. Your god of wrath and punishment is but a monstrous phantasy. It is not necessary that one should humble oneself to deserve assistance, it is sufficient that one should suffer.”

“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.”

“Art is a corner of creation seen through a temperament.”

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

“Civilization will not attain to its perfection until the last stone from the last church falls on the last priest.”

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

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

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

“I believe that all is illusion and vanity outside the treasure of truths slowly accumulated, and which will never again be lost. I believe that the sum of these truths, always increasing, will at last confer on man incalculable power and peace, if not happiness. Yes, I believe in the final triumph of life.”

“I believe that the future of humanity is in the progress of reason through science. I believe that the pursuit of truth, through science, is the divine ideal which man should propose to himself.”

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

“If people can just love each other a little bit, they can be so happy.”

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

“If you ask me what I came into this life to do, I will tell you: I came to live out loud.”

“If you shut up truth and bury it under the ground, it will but grow, and gather to itself such explosive power that the day it bursts through it will blow up everything in its way.”

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

“In Paris, everything's for sale: wise virgins, foolish virgins, truth and lies, tears and smiles.”

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

“Keep well; that is the half of wisdom and of happiness.”

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

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

“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?”

“Sin ought to be something exquisite, my dear boy.”

“The artist is nothing without the gift, but the gift is nothing without work.”

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

“The fate of animals is of greater importance to me than the fear of appearing ridiculous; it is indissolubly connected with the fate of men.”

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

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

“The truth is on the march and nothing will stop it.”