Top 70 Émile Zola Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “If you ask me what I came into this life to do, I will tell you: I came to live out loud.”

— Émile Zola

2. “Everything is only a dream.”

— Émile Zola

3. “The artist is nothing without the gift, but the gift is nothing without work.”

— Émile Zola

4. “Nothing develops intelligence like travel.”

— Émile Zola

5. “If you shut up truth and bury it under the ground, it will but grow, and gather to itself such explosive power that the day it bursts through it will blow up everything in its way.”

— Émile Zola

6. “Man’s highest duty is to protect animals from cruelty.”

— Émile Zola

7. “I have but one passion: to enlighten those who have been kept in the dark, in the name of humanity which has suffered so much and is entitled to happiness. My fiery protest is simply the cry of my very soul.”

— Émile Zola

8. “Civilization will not attain to its perfection until the last stone from the last church falls on the last priest.”

— Émile Zola

9. “If people can just love each other a little bit, they can be so happy.”

— Émile Zola

10. “She was cold by nature, self-love predominating over passion; rather than being virtuous, she preferred to have her pleasures all to herself.”

— Émile Zola

11. “The only basis for living is believing in life, loving it, and applying the whole force of one’s intellect to know it better.”

— Émile Zola

12. “It is not I who am strong, it is reason, it is truth.”

— Émile Zola

Featured in: Strong Quotes

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

— Émile Zola

14. “If I cannot overwhelm with my quality, I will overwhelm with my quantity.”

— Émile Zola

15. “One forges one’s style on the terrible anvil of daily deadlines.”

— Émile Zola

16. “The word realist means nothing to me, because I would subordinate reality to temperament. Give me what is true and I applaud; but give me what is individual and alive and I applaud even more.”

— Émile Zola

17. “There are two men inside the artist, the poet and the craftsman. One is born a poet. One becomes a craftsman.”

— Émile Zola

18. “These young people naturally grow up with ideas different from ours, for they are born for times when we shall no longer be here.”

— Émile Zola

Featured in: Quotes About Growing Up

19. “From the moment I start a new novel, life’s just one endless torture. The first few chapters may go fairly well and I may feel there’s still a chance to prove my worth, but that feeling soon disappears and every day I feel less and less satisfied.”

— Émile Zola

Featured in: Firsts Quotes

20. “Let us eat, drink and satisfy our coarse appetites, but let us keep our souls sacred and apart.”

— Émile Zola

21. “The road to Lourdes is littered with crutches, but not one wooden leg.”

— Émile Zola

22. “I am little concerned with beauty or perfection. I don’t care for the great centuries. All I care about is life, struggle, intensity.”

— Émile Zola

23. “The fate of animals is of greater importance to me than the fear of appearing ridiculous; it is indissolubly connected with the fate of men.”

— Émile Zola

24. “My fiery protest is simply the cry of my very soul.”

— Émile Zola

25. “Don’t go looking at me like that because you’ll wear your eyes out.”

— Émile Zola

26. “Art is a corner of creation seen through a temperament.”

— Émile Zola

27. “The truth is on the march and nothing will stop it.”

— Émile Zola

28. “If you shut up truth, and bury it underground, it will but grow.”

— Émile Zola

29. “The past was but the cemetery of our illusions: one simply stubbed one’s toes on the gravestones.”

— Émile Zola

30. “A ruined man fell from her hands like a ripe fruit, to lie rotting on the ground.”

— Émile Zola

31. “Sin ought to be something exquisite, my dear boy.”

— Émile Zola

32. “I do not despair in the least of ultimate triumph. I repeat it with intense conviction.”

— Émile Zola

33. “I am spending delightful afternoons in my garden, watching everything living around me. As I grow older, I feel everything departing, and I love everything with more passion.”

— Émile Zola

34. “Did not one spend the first half of one’s days in dreams of happiness and the second half in regrets and terrors?”

— Émile Zola

Featured in: Firsts Quotes

35. “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!”

— Émile Zola

36. “In my view you cannot claim to have seen something until you have photographed it.”

— Émile Zola

37. “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.”

— Émile Zola

38. “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.”

— Émile Zola

39. “It is not necessary that one should humble oneself to deserve assistance, it is sufficient that one should suffer.”

— Émile Zola

40. “Yes! live life with every fibre of one’s being, surrender oneself to it, with no thoughts of rebellion, without deluding oneself that one can improve it and render it painless.”

— Émile Zola

41. “Blow the candle out, I don’t need to see what my thoughts look like.”

— Émile Zola

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

— Émile Zola

43. “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.”

— Émile Zola

44. “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?”

— Émile Zola

45. “The day is not far off when one ordinary carrot may be pregnant with revolution.”

— Émile Zola

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

— Émile Zola

47. “Why then should money be blamed for all the dirt and crimes it causes? For is love less filthy – love which creates life?”

— Émile Zola

48. “In love as in speculation there is much filth; in love also, people think only of their own gratification; yet without love there would be no life, and the world would come to an end.”

— Émile Zola

49. “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.”

— Émile Zola

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

— Émile Zola