Émile Zola Quotes

I would rather die of passion than of boredom.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Art is a corner of creation seen through a temperament.

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

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

They dared not peer down into their own natures, down into the feverish confusion that filled their minds with a kind of dense, acrid mist.

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.

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.

But you said so yourself, the poor lass will die of it...Do you really want her to die?'Yes, I'd rather she died than have a bad life.

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

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?

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

The passion for defiling things was inborn in her. It was not enough for her to destroy them, she had to soil them too.

She [Nana] listened to his [Steiner's] propositions, turning them down every time with a shake of the head and that provocative laughter which is peculiar to full-bodied blondes.

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

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

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.

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

When younger, he had been fun-loving to the point of tedium.

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.

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

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

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

The festivity had reached that apogee of joy when you face the happy fate of being crushed to death.