Emile Zola Quotes & Sayings

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

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

Don't go looking at me like that because you'll wear your eyes out. — Emile Zola

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

The air there was heavy with the somnolence of a party prolonged into the early hours; and a dull light came from the lamps, whose charred wicks glowed red inside their globes. The ladies had reached that vaguely melancholy hour when they felt it necessary to tell each other the story of their lives. — Emile Zola

Nothing develops intelligence like travel. — Emile Zola

It is not I who am strong, it is reason, it is truth. — Emile Zola

Has science ever retreated? No! It is Catholicism which has always retreated before her, and will always be forced to retreat. — Emile Zola

In the sudden change that had come over her heart she no longer recognized herself — Emile Zola

Everything is only a dream. — Emile Zola

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

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

Kings may usurp thrones, republics may be established, but the town scarcely stirs. Plassan sleeps while Paris fights. — Emile Zola

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

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

There Albine lay, panting, exhausted by love, her hands clutched closer and closer to her heart, breathing her last. She parted her lips, seeking the kiss which should obliterate her, and then the hyacinths and tuberoses exhaled their incense, wrapping her in a final sigh, so profound that it drowned the chorus of roses, and in this culminating gasp of blossom, Albine was dead. — Emile Zola

When you have a sorrow that is too great it leaves no room for any other. — Emile Zola

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

I am spending delightful afternoons in my garden, watching everything living around me. As I grow older, I feel everything departing, and I love everything with more passion. — Emile Zola

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

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

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. — Emile Zola

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

I'm a very ordinary man who's worked and fed like everyone else. I'm no longer afraid of dying, but death doesn't seem to want anything to do with me, now that I can see no point in living. I'm afraid he's forgotten me. — Emile Zola

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. — Emile Zola

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

He had ceased to believe in the efficacy of alms; it was not sufficient that one should be charitable, henceforth one must be just. Given justice, indeed, horrid misery would disappear, and no such thing as charity would be needed. — Emile Zola

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

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

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. — Emile Zola

Classical education has deformed everything, and has imposed upon us as geniuses men of correct, facile talent, who follow the beaten track. — Emile Zola

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

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

Sin became a luxury, a flower set in her hair, a diamond fastened on her brow. — Emile Zola

If people can just love each other a little bit, they can be so happy. — Emile Zola

Albine now yielded to him, and Serge possessed her.
And the whole garden was engulfed together with the couple in one last cry of love's passion. The tree-trunks bent as under a powerful wind. The blades of grass emitted sobs of intoxication. The flowers, fainting, lips half-open, breathed out their souls. The sky itself, aflame with the setting of the great star, held its clouds motionless, faint with love, whence superhuman rapture fell. And it was the victory of all the wild creatures, all plants and all things natural, which willed the entry of these two children into the eternity of life. — Emile Zola

The whole of Paris was lit up. The tiny dancing flames had bespangled the sea of darkness from end to end of the horizon, and now, like millions of stars, they burned with a steady light in the serene summer night. There was no breath of wind to make them flicker as they hung there in space. They made the unseen city seem as vast as a firmament, reaching out into infinity. — Emile Zola

Satin occupied a couple of rooms which a chemist had furnished for her in order to rescue her from the clutches of the police; but in little over a year she had broken the furniture, knocked in the chairs and dirtied the curtains in such a frenzy of filth and disorder that the two rooms looked as if they were inhabited by a pack of mad cats. — Emile Zola

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

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

Ever since the morning, Pierre had beheld many frightful sufferings in that woeful white train. But none had so distressed his soul as did that wretched female skeleton, liquefying in the midst of its lace and its millions. — Emile Zola

They again kissed each other and fell asleep. The patch of light on the ceiling now seemed to be assuming the shape of a terrified eye, that stared wildly and fixedly upon the pale, slumbering couple who reeked with crime beneath their very sheets, and dreamt they could see a rain of blood falling in big drops, which turned into golden coins as they plashed upon the floor. — Emile Zola

The stench of the manure that Jean was turning had cheered him up a little. He adored its promise of fertility and was sniffing it with the relish of a man smelling a randy woman. — Emile Zola

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. — Emile Zola

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

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

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

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

The more grievous the sin, the greater the repentance, God was bidding His time. — Emile Zola

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

As if one killed by calculation! A person kills only from an impulse that springs from his blood and sinews, from the vestiges of ancient struggles, from the need to live and the joy of being strong. — Emile Zola

"Well then! it was the end; his ruin was complete. Even if he mended the cables and lit the fires, where would he find men? Another fortnight's strike and he would be bankrupt. And in this certainty of disaster he no longer felt any hatred of the Montsou bandits; he felt that all had a hand in it, that it was a general agelong fault. They were brutes, no doubt, but brutes who could not read, and who were dying of hunger. — Emile Zola

This sounded the death knell of small family businesses, soon to be followed by the disappearance of the individual entrepreneur, gobbled up one by one by the increasingly hungry ogre of capitalism, and drowned by the rising tide of large companies. — Emile Zola

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. — Emile Zola

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

You'd never get Burle to behave decently. When a man sank as low as that, the only thing to do was to throw a spadeful of mud over him and get rid of him like the rotting carcass of some poisonous beast. And even if you shoved his nose in his own shit, he'd only start again the next day and end up stealing a few sous to buy sticks of barley sugar for lice-ridden little beggar-girls. — Emile Zola

Very well, sir. A woman's opinion, however humble she may be, is always worth listening to, if she's got any sense...If you put yourself in my hands, I shall certainly make a decent man of you. — Emile Zola

The fate of animals is of far greater importance to me than the fear of appearing ridiculous. — Emile Zola

The artist is nothing without the gift, but the gift is nothing without work. — Emile Zola

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

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

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

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

...the water was scarcely inviting; for, through fear lest the output of the source should not suffice, the Fathers of the Grotto only allowed the water of the baths to be changed twice a day. And nearly a hundred patients being dipped in the same water, it can be imagined what a terrible soup the latter at last became. All manner of things were found in it, so that it was like a frightful consomme of all ailments, a field of cultivation for every kind of poisonous germ, a quintessence of the most dreaded contagious diseases; the miraculous feature of it all being that men should emerge alive from their immersion in such filth. — Emile Zola

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

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

He was possessed now with that obsession for the cross in which so many lips have worn themselves away on crucifixes. — Emile Zola

Speculation, speculation!' she [Caroline Hamelin] mechanically repeated, struggling with her doubts. 'Ah! the idea of it fills my heart with disturbing anguish. — Emile Zola

Respectable people... What bastards! — Emile Zola

Governments are suspicious of literature because it is a force that eludes them. — Emile Zola

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

There are two men inside the artist, the poet and the craftsman. One is born a poet. One becomes a craftsman. — Emile Zola

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

they seemed to be greater strangers than before — Emile Zola

When they got back into the carriage they felt greater strangers than before. — Emile Zola

I am an artist ... I am here to live out loud. — Emile Zola

such a strange look of repugnance and horror — Emile Zola

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

Raising her arms, she defied Heaven.
'So,' she cried, 'you prefer your God to me? You think he is stronger than I am. You think he will love you better than I would? Ah, what a child you are! Do stop talking such twaddle. What we are going to do is go back to the garden together, and love each other, be happy and free, for that is life. — Emile Zola

Sin ought to be something exquisite, my dear boy. — Emile Zola

It is a crime to poison the minds of the meek and the humble, to stoke the passions of reactionism and intolerance, by appealing to that odious anti-Semitism that, unchecked, will destroy the freedom-loving France of the Rights of Man. It is a crime to exploit patriotism in the service of hatred, and it is, finally, a crime to ensconce the sword as the modern god, whereas all science is toiling to achieve the coming era of truth and justice. — Emile Zola

Nothing is more irritating than to hear honest writers protest about depravity when one is quite certain that they make these noises without knowing what they are protesting about. — Emile Zola

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

The truth is on the march and nothing will stop it. — Emile Zola

When there is no hope in the future, the present appears atrociously bitter. — Emile Zola

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. — Emile Zola

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

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

These people came into the world and left it bound to their soil, proliferating on their own dung-hills with slow deliberation like the uncomplicated soul of trees which scatter their seed about their feet, with little conception of any larger world beyond the dun rocks among which they vegetated. — Emile Zola

His creation was a sort of new religion; the churches, gradually deserted by a wavering faith, were replaced by this bazaar, in the minds of the idle women of Paris. Women now came and spent their leisure time in his establishment, the shivering and anxious hours they formerly passed in churches: a necessary consumption of nervous passion, a growing struggle of the god of dress against the husband, the incessantly renewed religion of the body with the divine future of beauty. — Emile Zola

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

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

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

Civilization will not attain to its perfection until the last stone from the last church falls on the last priest. — Emile Zola

Angelique, with both hands open, lying limply on her knees, was giving herself. And Felicien remembered the evening on which she had run barefoot through the grass, so adorable that he had pursued her, and whispered in her ear, "I love you". And he understood full well that only now had she replied, with the same cry, "I love you." And he understood full well that only now had she replied, with the same cry, "I love you", the eternal cry that had finally emerged from her wide-open heart. "I love you... Take me, carry me away, I am yours. — Emile Zola

Essentially, Doctor Pascal's only faith was his faith in life. Life was the unique manifestation of the divine. Life was God, the great motive power, the soul of the universe. And the sole instrument of life was heredity, which made the world; so that if one could only understand it, master it and make it do one's bidding, one could remake the world at will. — Emile Zola

How the thought of meeting lost loved ones would sweeten one's last moments, how eagerly would one embrace them, and what bliss to live together once more in immortality! He suffered agonies when he considered religion's charitable lie, which compassionately conceals the terrible truth from feeble creatures. No, everything finished at death, nothing that we had loved was ever reborn, our farewells were for ever. For ever! For ever! That was the dreadful thought that carried his mind hurtling down abysses of emptiness. — Emile Zola

Death had to take her little by little, bit by bit, dragging her along to the bitter end of the miserable existence she'd made for herself. They never even knew what she did die of. Some spoke of a chill. But the truth was that she died from poverty, from the filth and the weariness of her wretched life. — Emile Zola

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

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