Emile Zola

Has science ever retreated? No! It is Catholicism which has always retreated before her, and will always be forced to retreat.

It was always the same; other people gave up loving before she did. They got spoilt, or else they went away; in any case, they were partly to blame. Why did it happen so? She herself never changed; when she loved anyone, it was for life. She could not understand desertion; it was something so huge, so monstrous that the notion of it made her little heart break.

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

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

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.

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

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?

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.

I believe that all is illusion and vanity outside the treasure of truths slowly accumulated, and which will never again be lost. I believe that the sum of these truths, always increasing, will at last confer on man incalculable power and peace, if not happiness. Yes, I believe in the final triumph of life.

Keep well; that is the half of wisdom and of happiness.

People like comfort; that\'s natural. But as for making money simply for the sake of making it, and giving yourself far more trouble and anxiety to gain it than you can ever get pleasure from it when it\'s gained, why, as for me, I\'d rather sit still and cross my arms.

One must be arrogant, indeed, to imagine that one can take everything in one\'s hand and know everything!

Selling beauty is something I can understand. Even selling false beauty seems perfectly natural; it\'s a sign of progress.

The fear of life, the fear of burdens and of duties, of annoyances and of catastrophes! The fear of life, which makes us, through dread of its sufferings, refuse its joys. Ah! I tell you, this cowardliness enrages me; I cannot forgive it. We must live - live a complete life - live all our life.

Vines will be planted, corn will spring up, a whole growth of new crops; and people will still fall in love in vintages and harvests yet to come. Life is eternal; it is a perpetual renewal of birth and growth.

I believe that the future of humanity is in the progress of reason through science. I believe that the pursuit of truth, through science, is the divine ideal which man should propose to himself.

Up to this day, there has been no proof of the existence of any intelligence other than the human.

When people have not the same ideas, it is certainly better not to talk about them.

I defy you to find any real will, any reasoning force, outside of life. And everything is there; there is, in the world, no other will than this force which impels everything to life, a life even broader and higher.

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

The vague torment of ... ambition.

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.

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.

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!

She might have liked to try to strangle him with those slender fingers of hers, but she wanted to make a job of it and this great patience with which she waited for her claws to grow was in itself a form of enjoyment.

Nothing develops intelligence like travel.

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

The conclusion does not belong to the artist.

Respectable people... What bastards!

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.