Emile Zola
Emile Zola
Émile Édouard Charles Antoine Zola was a French novelist, playwright, journalist, the best-known practitioner of the literary school of naturalism, and an important contributor to the development of theatrical naturalism. He was a major figure in the political liberalization of France and in the exoneration of the falsely accused and convicted army officer Alfred Dreyfus, which is encapsulated in the renowned newspaper headline J'accuse. Zola was nominated for the first and second Nobel Prize in Literature in 1901 and 1902...
NationalityFrench
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth2 April 1840
CountryFrance
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.
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.
The only basis for living is believing in life, loving it, and applying the whole force of one's intellect to know it better.
There are two men inside the artist, the poet and the craftsman. One is born a poet. One becomes a craftsman.
An entire lifetime would not be long enough for you to exhaust the glance of the young harvest-girl.
Blow the candle out, I don't need to see what my thoughts look like.
Let us eat, drink and satisfy our coarse appetites, but let us keep our souls sacred and apart.
Classical education has deformed everything, and has imposed upon us as geniuses men of correct, facile talent, who follow the beaten track.
I am an artist... I am here to live out loud.
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.
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.
The road to Lourdes is littered with crutches, but not one wooden leg.
Civilization will not attain to its perfection until the last stone from the last church falls on the last priest.
If I cannot overwhelm with my quality, I will overwhelm with my quantity.