1. “An entire lifetime would not be long enough for you to exhaust the glance of the young harvest-girl.” – Émile Zola
2. “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.” – Émile Zola
3. “Sin ought to be something exquisite, my dear boy.” – Émile Zola
4. “Why then should money be blamed for all the dirt and crimes it causes? For is love less filthy – love which creates life?” – Émile Zola
5. “A ruined man fell from her hands like a ripe fruit, to lie rotting on the ground.” – Émile Zola
6. “The artist is nothing without the gift, but the gift is nothing without work.” – Émile Zola
7. “Man’s highest duty is to protect animals from cruelty.” – Émile Zola
8. “Truth is on the march, and nothing will stop it.” – Émile Zola
9. “In my view you cannot claim to have seen something until you have photographed it.” – Émile Zola
10. “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.” – Émile Zola
11. “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.” – Émile Zola
12. “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?” – Émile Zola
13. “I am an artist… I am here to live out loud.” – Émile Zola
14. “If you shut up truth, and bury it underground, it will but grow.” – Émile Zola
15. “The truth is on the march and nothing will stop it.” – Émile Zola
16. “I would rather die of passion than of boredom.” – Émile Zola
17. “When lovers kiss on the cheeks, it is because they are searching, feeling for one another’s lips. Lovers are made by a kiss.” – Émile Zola
18. “The day is not far off when one ordinary carrot may be pregnant with revolution.” – Émile Zola
19. “She was cold by nature, self-love predominating over passion; rather than being virtuous, she preferred to have her pleasures all to herself.” – Émile Zola
20. “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.” – Émile Zola
21. “My fiery protest is simply the cry of my very soul.” – Émile Zola
22. “One forges one’s style on the terrible anvil of daily deadlines.” – Émile Zola
23. “Nothing could be more heart rending than this mute and motionless dispair” – Émile Zola
24. “In the sudden change that had come over her heart she no longer recognized herself” – Émile Zola
25. “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.” – Émile Zola
26. “Oh, the fools, like a lot of good little schoolboys, scared to death of anything they’ve been taught is wrong!” – Émile Zola
27. “We are like books. Most people only see our cover, the minority read only the introduction, many people believe the critics. Few will know our content.” – Émile Zola
28. “It is not necessary that one should humble oneself to deserve assistance, it is sufficient that one should suffer.” – Émile Zola
29. “The past was but the cemetery of our illusions: one simply stubbed one’s toes on the gravestones.” – Émile Zola
30. “I am little concerned with beauty or perfection. I don’t care for the great centuries. All I care about is life, struggle, intensity.” – Émile Zola
31. “I am here to live out loud.” – Émile Zola
32. “Art is a corner of creation seen through a temperament.” – Émile Zola
33. “Nothing develops intelligence like travel.” – Émile Zola
34. “When a peasant begins to feel the need for instruction, he usually becomes fiercely calculating.” – Émile Zola
35. “Civilization will not attain to its perfection until the last stone from the last church falls on the last priest.” – Émile Zola
36. “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.” – Émile Zola
37. “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.” – Émile Zola
38. “The thought is a deed. Of all deeds she fertilizes the world most.” – Émile Zola
39. “It is not I who am strong, it is reason, it is truth.” – Émile Zola
40. “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.” – Émile Zola
41. “When you have a sorrow that is too great it leaves no room for any other.” – Émile Zola
42. “When there is no hope in the future, the present appears atrociously bitter.” – Émile Zola
43. “If something’s just, I’ll let myself be hacked to bits for it.” – Émile Zola
44. “Violence has never prospered, you can’t remake the world in a day. Anyone who promises to change everything for you all at once is either a fool or a rogue!” – Émile Zola
45. “Through the centuries, the history of peoples is but a lesson in mutual tolerance.” – Émile Zola
46. “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.” – Émile Zola
47. “There are two men inside the artist, the poet and the craftsman. One is born a poet. One becomes a craftsman.” – Émile Zola
48. “Blow the candle out, I don’t need to see what my thoughts look like.” – Émile Zola
49. “These young people naturally grow up with ideas different from ours, for they are born for times when we shall no longer be here.” – Émile Zola
50. “Everything is only a dream.” – Émile Zola
51. “When truth is buried underground it grows, it chokes, it gathers such an explosive force that on the day it bursts out, it blows up everything with it.” – Émile Zola
52. “Don’t go looking at me like that because you’ll wear your eyes out.” – Émile Zola
53. “Since the same human mire remains beneath, does not all civilization reduce itself to the superiority of smelling nice and living well?” – Émile Zola
54. “The only basis for living is believing in life, loving it, and applying the whole force of one’s intellect to know it better.” – Émile Zola
55. “There’s only one thing that warms my heart, and that is the thought that we are going to sweep away these bourgeois.” – Émile Zola
56. “Let us eat, drink and satisfy our coarse appetites, but let us keep our souls sacred and apart.” – Émile Zola
57. “Art for me, is a negation of society, an affirmation of the individual, outside of all the rules and all the demands of society.” – Émile Zola
58. “If I cannot overwhelm with my quality, I will overwhelm with my quantity.” – Émile Zola
59. “The road to Lourdes is littered with crutches, but not one wooden leg.” – Émile Zola
60. “If you ask me what I came into this life to do, I will tell you: I came to live out loud.” – Émile Zola
61. “The conclusion does not belong to the artist.” – Émile Zola
62. “I do not despair in the least of ultimate triumph. I repeat it with intense conviction.” – Émile Zola
63. “Perfection is such a nuisance that I often regret having cured myself of using tobacco.” – Émile Zola
64. “Has science ever retreated? No! It is Catholicism which has always retreated before her, and will always be forced to retreat.” – Émile Zola
65. “Classical education has deformed everything, and has imposed upon us as geniuses men of correct, facile talent, who follow the beaten track.” – Émile Zola
66. “Yes! live life with every fibre of one’s being, surrender oneself to it, with no thoughts of rebellion, without deluding oneself that one can improve it and render it painless.” – Émile Zola
67. “Inability, human incapacity, is the only boundary to an art.” – Émile Zola