Quotes from zola emile

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

Classical education has deformed everything, and has imposed upon us as geniuses men of correct, facile talent, who follow the beaten track.

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

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.

A god of kindness would be charitable to all. Your god of wrath and punishment is but a monstrous phantasy.

Truth is on the march; nothing can stop it now.

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

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

Everything is only a dream.

In the day, he thought of nothing; at night, he slept heavily and dreamlessly. Face pink and fat, stomach full, brain empty, he was happy.

It was the usual story of penniless young men, who think themselves obliged by their birth to choose a liberal profession and bury themselves in a sort of vain mediocrity, happy even when they escape starvation, notwithstanding their numerous degrees.

He dreamed of a life of cheap and sensual pleasure, a fine life full of women, of reclining on couches, eating, getting drunk.