Émile Zola Quotes

They were brutes, no doubt, but brutes who could not read, and who were dying of hunger.

In January 1898 Zola took an important part in the defense of Captain Alfred Dreyfus, a French Jew unjustly accused of selling military secrets to Germany.

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.

Why had he found her unattractive? Now that she was all black and her face covered in a thin layer of coal-dust, she had a strange charm.

The Empire was on the point of turning Paris into the bawdy house of Europe. The gang of fortune-seekers who had succeeded in stealing a throne required a reign of adventures, shady transactions, sold consciences, bought women, and rampant drunkenness.

Both women, looking different ways, kept shrugging their shoulders, and asking themselves how the deuce the other could tell such woppers!

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.

Like certain devotees, who think they can fool God and wrest a pardon by paying lip-service to prayer and adopting the humble attitude of the penitent, Therese humiliated herself, beat her chest, found words of repentance, without having anything in the bottom of her heart except fear and cowardice.

She liked this young fellow with that expansive feeling that old women display for people who come from their own part of the country, bringing with them memories of the past.

He was one of the simple-minded, one whose simplicity was divine, and who had remained on the threshold of the temple, kneeling before the tapers which from a distance he took for stars.

Paris, pareil à un pan de ciel étoilé tombé sur un coin de la terre noire, lui apparut sévère et comme fâché de son retour.

How evil life must be if it were indeed necessary that such imploring cries, such cries of physical and moral wretchedness, should ever and ever ascend to heaven!

Essentially, Doctor Pascal's only faith was his faith in life. Life was the unique manifestation of the divine. Life was God, the great motive power, the soul of the universe. And the sole instrument of life was heredity, which made the world; so that if one could only understand it, master it and make it do one's bidding, one could remake the world at will.

Tout d’un coup, dans la bonne enfant, la femme se dressait, inquiétante, apportant le coup de folie de son sexe, ouvrant l’inconnu du désir. Nana souriait toujours, mais d’un sourire aigu de mangeuse d’hommes.

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.