Emile Quotes & Sayings

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

So long as man is protected by madness - he functions - and flourishes. — Emile M. Cioran

And that wreched creature without hands or feet, who had to be put to bed and fed like a child, that pitiable remnant of a man, whose almost vanished life was nothing more than one scream of pain, cried out in furious indignation: 'What a fool one must be to go and kill oneself!' - 'Joy of Life — Emile Zola

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

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

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

The wise man, knowing how to enjoy achieved results without having constantly to replace them with others, finds in them an attachment to life in the hour of difficulty. — Emile Durkheim

Society: an inferno of saviors! — Emile M. Cioran

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

And, in the warm silence, in the peaceful solitude of the study, Clotilde smiled down at the baby who was still sucking - his little arm in the air, pointing upwards, a symbol of hope and life. — Emile Zola

Governments will always misuse the machinery of the law as far as the state of public opinion permits. — Emile Capouya

Our place is somewhere between being and nonbeing - between two fictions. — Emile M. Cioran

Or, rather, let us be more simple and less vain. — Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Oh yeah, I'm the president of the lucky club. There are so many talented people who don't work. And the crop of young actors I'm surrounded by is incredible. When you have people like that around you it amps you up a little bit. Also, Emile Hirsch and Joseph Gordon-Levitt, or guys like Ryan Gosling. It's a really good crowd and I feel I'm coming up at a good time. But equally, there's a lot of good young actors who don't get to work who are more talented than I. I'm just lucky. — Shia Labeouf

If you shut up truth, and bury it underground, it will but grow. — 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 Wretched of the Earth is an explosion. — Emile Capouya

Emile was not like you, not attached to houses. For you, houses are like people, are they not, they have a soul, a heart, they live and breathe. Houses remember. — Tatiana De Rosnay

The mind is the result of the torments the flesh undergoes or inflicts upon itself. — Emile M. Cioran

To defy heredity is to defy billions of years, to defy the first cell — Emile M. Cioran

Religious phenomena are naturally arranged in two fundamental categories: beliefs and rites. The first are states of opinion, and consist in representations; the second are determined modes of action. — Emile Durkheim

Most actors are lucky to ever get a job, period. I never forget that, because I have so many actor friends in L.A., and most of us barely ever work. And those of us that do, it's still only 60 days out of the year that we're actually on camera. It's an absurdly low number. — Emile Hirsch

they seemed to be greater strangers than before — Emile Zola

... Have you ever reflected that posterity may not be the faultless dispenser of justice that we dream of? One consoles oneself for being insulted and denied, by reyling on the equity of the centuries to come; just as the faithful endure all the abominations of this earth in the firm belief of another life, in which each will be rewarded according to his deserts. But suppose Paradise exists no more for the artist than it does for the Catholic, suppose that future generations prolong the misunderstanding and prefer amiable little trifles to vigorous works! Ah! What a sell it would be, eh? To have led a convict's life - to have screwed oneself down to one's work - all for a mere delusion!...

"Bah! What does it matter? Well, there's nothing hereafter. We are even madder than the fools who kill themselves for a woman. When the earth splits to pieces in space like a dry walnut, our works won't add one atom to its dust. — Emile Zola

It is not human nature which can assign the variable limits necessary to our needs. They are thus unlimited so far as they depend on the individual alone. Irrespective of any external regulatory force, our capacity for feeling is in itself an insatiable and bottomless abyss. — Emile Durkheim

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

All people see fires, storms, explosions, or landscapes; but how many feel the flames, the lightnings, the whirlwinds, or the harmony? How many have an inner beauty that tinges their melancholy? — Emile M. Cioran

Psychoanalysis is a technique we practice at our cost; psychoanalysis degrades our risks, our dangers, our depths; it strips us of our impurities, of all that made us curious about ourselves. — Emile M. Cioran

The real act of discovery consists not in finding new lands but in seeing with new eyes. The only adventure that is doomed from the start is the one we do not attempt. — Paul-Emile Victor

A person is not merely a single subject distinguished from all the others. It is especially a being to which is attributed a relative autonomy in relation to the environment with which it is most immediately in contact. — Emile Durkheim

What are you waiting for in order to give up? — Emile M. Cioran

Existing is plagiarism. — Emile M. Cioran

To think is to say no. — Emile Chartier

Men have been obliged to make for themselves a notion of what religion is, long before the science of religions started its methodical comparisons. — Emile Durkheim

Never subject to the rules, believing that the correct judgement and healthy nature keep her in the honesty she lived in. — Emile Zola

"The Holy Ghost," Luther instructs us, "is not a skeptic." Not everyone can be, and that is really too bad. — Emile M. Cioran

Intelligence flourishes only in the ages when belief withers. — Emile M. Cioran

A father is the one friend upon whom we can always rely. In the hour of need, when all else fails, we remember him upon whose knees we sat when children, and who soothed our sorrows; and even though he may be unable to assist us, his mere presence serves to comfort and strengthen us. — Emile Gaboriau

Every form of talent involves a certain shameless-ness. — Emile M. Cioran

Our wisdom is slavish prejudice, our customs consist in control,
constraint, compulsion. Civilised man is born and dies a slave.
The infant is bound up in swaddling clothes, the corpse is nailed
down in his coffin. All his life long man is imprisoned by our
institutions. — Jean-Jacques Rousseau

A man who fears ridicule will never go far, for good or ill: he remains on this side of this talents, and even if he has genius, he is doomed to mediocrity. — Emile M. Cioran

A high-school teacher, after all, is a person deputized by the rest of us to explain to the young what sort of world they are living in, and to defend, if possible, the part their elders are playing in it — Emile Capouya

Democracy: a festival of mediocrity. — Emile M. Cioran

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

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

Life is merely a fracas on an unmapped terrain, and the universe a geometry stricken with epilepsy. — Emile M. Cioran

The painter's appreciation for beauty is more conscious, for he spends his life trying to communicate his feelings to others. — Emile Gruppe

How much cooler was Oz than seeing the little dude behind the curtain? — Emile Hirsch

A people represents not so much an aggregate of ideas and theories as of obsessions. — Emile M. Cioran

I would like to go mad on one condition, namely, that I would become a happy madman, lively and always in a good mood, without any troubles and obsessions, laughing senselessly from morning to night. — Emile M. Cioran

Much more than our other needs and endeavors, it is sexuality that puts us on an even footing with our kind: the more we practice it, the more we become like everyone else: it is in the performance of a reputedly bestial function that we prove our status as citizens: nothing is more public than the sexual act. — Emile M. Cioran

He knew that, from now on, every day would be alike, that they would all bring the same sufferings. And he saw the weeks, the months, the years that awaited him, gloomy and implacable, coming one after the other, falling on him and suffocating him bit by bit. When the future is without hope, the present takes on a vile, bitter taste. — Emile Zola

Knowledge, having irritated and stimulated our appetite for power, will lead us inexorably to our ruin. — Emile M. Cioran

Art is a corner of creation seen through a temperament. — Emile Zola

I live only because it is in my power to die when I choose to: without the idea of suicide, I'd have killed myself right away. — Emile M. Cioran

Society is not a disease, it is a disaster. What a stupid miracle that one can live in it. — Emile M. Cioran

He who hates himself is not humble. — Emile M. Cioran

When I got a lap dance, because I was 17, they had to put a massive pillow between me and the girl when she was grinding me. It was weird, yet pleasurable. — Emile Hirsch

The liberal professions, and in a wider sense the well-to-do classes, are certainly those with the liveliest taste for knowledge and the most active intellectual life. — Emile Durkheim

If you finish like a photograph, on the other hand, the picture has as much personality as a photograph. — Emile Gruppe

Like those imperceptible insects which, having once penetrated the root of a tree devour it in a single night, suspicion, when it invades our minds, soon develops itself and destroys our firmest beliefs. — Emile Gaboriau

Man cannot become attached to higher aims and submit to a rule if he sees nothing above him to which he belongs. To free him from all social pressure is to abandon him to himself and demoralize him. — Emile Durkheim

I have only one thing to say to the melancholy man: 'Look into the distance.' ... When you look at the stars or the ocean's expanse, your eye is completely relaxed; once your eye is relaxed, your mind is unfettered. — Emile Chartier

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

such a strange look of repugnance and horror — Emile Zola

What every man who loves his country hopes for in his inmost heart: the suppression of half his compatriots. — Emile M. Cioran

Whoever makes an attempt on a man's life, on a man's liberty, on a man's honour inspires us with a feeling of horror in every way analogous to that which the believer experiences when he sees his idol profaned. — Emile Durkheim

Humanity adores only those who cause it to perish. — Emile M. Cioran

Our first intuitions are the true ones. — Emile M. Cioran

We derive our vitality from our store of madness. — Emile M. Cioran

That men have an interest in knowing the world which surrounds them, and consequently that their reflection should have been applied to it at an early date, is something that everyone will readily admit. — Emile Durkheim

Especially these days where everything is so polite and so proper, I think that rites of passage are good. — Emile Hirsch

I have a lot of people in my life who are truly ridiculous characters, and they're very, very funny people, but they don't really try to be. They're not cracking jokes. — Emile Hirsch

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

If you ask me what I came to do in this world, I, an artist, will answer you: I am here to live out loud. — Emile Zola

Social man...is the masterpiece of existence. — Emile Durkheim

...it was absurd to have killed a man for nothing... — Emile Zola

It was very, very challenging being on this thing called the gimbal. It would throw you around, give you whiplash, and they'd tie you down. — Emile Hirsch

The power of thought, of idea, is incommensurable, is immeasurable. The world is dominated by thought. — Emile Coue

A religion is a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things, that is to say, things set apart and forbidden-beliefs and practices which unite into one single moral community called a Church, all those who adhere to them. — Emile Durkheim

Since all life is futility, then the decision to exist must be the most irrational of all. — Emile M. Cioran

It is a quite remarkable fact that the great religions of the most civilized peoples are more deeply fraught with sadness than the simpler beliefs of earlier societies. This certainly does not mean that the current of pessimism is eventually to submerge the other, but it proves that it does not lose ground and that it does not seem destined to disappear. — Emile Durkheim

From our birth to our death we are all the slaves of suggestion. — Emile Coue

I can be free only to the extent that others are forbidden to profit from their physical, economic, or other superiority to the detriment of my liberty. — Emile Durkheim

To possess a high degree of consciousness, to be always aware of yourself in relation to the world, to live in the permanent tension of knowledge, means to be lost for life. — Emile M. Cioran

There is no society known where a more or less developed criminality is not found under different forms. No people exists whose morality is not daily infringed upon. We must therefore call crime necessary and declare that it cannot be non-existent, that the fundamental conditions of social organization, as they are understood, logically imply it. — Emile Durkheim

I think I've always been half out of my shell and half in. Sometimes I can be extremely wild and sometimes I can be extremely shy. It just depends on the day. — Emile Hirsch

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

Music acts on the whole of the organism like a magic force which suppresses the understanding and irresistibly takes possession of the entire being. To insist on analysing this force is to destroy its very essence. — Emile Jaques-Dalcroze

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

The genres are widening. I don't think that there's as many limitations on the kinds of projects that actors can do as there once was. — Emile Hirsch

I remember when I saw 'The Matrix' when I was 13, I saw it in the theaters, and I was so blown away by it. It was one of the most memorable experiences I definitely ever had in the theater. — Emile Hirsch

The couple fell one atop of the other, struck down, finding consolation, at last, in death. — Emile Zola

To Foreswear vengeance is to chain oneself to forgiveness, to flounder in pardon, to be tainted by the hatred smothered within. — Emile M. Cioran

The aphorism is cultivated only by those who have known fear in the midst of words, that fear of collapsing with all the words. — Emile M. Cioran

If we had the courage to confront the doubts we timidly conceive about ourselves, none of us would utter an 'I' without shame. — Emile M. Cioran

Those who believe in their truth
the only ones whose imprint is retained by the memory of men
leave the earth behind them strewn with corpses. Religions number in their ledgers more murders than the bloodiest tyrannies account for, and those whom humanity has called divine far surpass the most conscientious murderers in their thirst for slaughter. — Emile M. Cioran

People always ask me about career choices, though it rarely ever seems like any kind of choice. It's just like, I really want to do something, this is what I can do, and that's it. I'm lucky to be doing this at all. — Emile Hirsch

Wisdom disguises our wounds; it teaches us how to bleed in secret. — Emile M. Cioran