246 Quotes by Émile Zola

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

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

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.

It all seemed a hollow sham now - that strict code, that conscientious virtue that condemned her to the sterile joys of pious women! No, no, she'd had enough of that; she wanted to live!

His was the sceptical boredom of a whole generation, no longer the romantic ennui of a Werther or a Rene lamenting the passing of old beliefs, but the boredom of the new doubting heroes, the young chemists who angrily proclaim the world intolerable because they have not immediately found life at the bottom of their test tubes.

Hélène slowly surveyed the room. In this respectable society, amongst these apparently decent middle-class people, were there none but faithless wives? With her strict provincial morality, she was amazed at the licensed promiscuity of Parisian life.

Boredom was at the root of Lazare's unhappiness, an oppressive, unremitting boredom, exuding from everything like the muddy water of a poisoned spring. He was bored with leisure, with work, with himself even more than with others. Meanwhile he blamed his own idleness for it, he ended by being ashamed of it.

And still, again and again, even more distinctly than before, as if they had been working their way closer to the surface, the comrades tapped and tapped. Beneath the blazing rays of the sun, on this morning when the world seemed young, such was the stirring which the land carried in its womb. New men were starting into life, a black army of vengeance slowly germinating in the furrows, growing for the harvests of the century to come; and soon this germination would tear the earth apart.

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?