Emile Zola
The road to Lourdes is littered with crutches, but not one wooden leg.Collection: Legs
The past was but the cemetery of our illusions: one simply stubbed one's toes on the gravestones.Collection: Past
When you have a sorrow that is too great it leaves no room for any other.Collection: Sorrow
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?Collection: Dog
An entire lifetime would not be long enough for you to exhaust the glance of the young harvest-girl.Collection: Girl
My fiery protest is simply the cry of my very soul.Collection: Soul
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.Collection: Love
Through the centuries, the history of peoples is but a lesson in mutual tolerance.Collection: History
It is not necessary that one should humble oneself to deserve assistance, it is sufficient that one should suffer.Collection: Humble
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.Collection: Life
Art for me...is a negation of society, an affirmation of the individual, outside of all the rules and all the demands of society.Collection: Art
A new dynasty is never founded without a struggle. Blood makes good manure.Collection: Struggle
The vague torment of ... ambition.Collection: Ambition
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.Collection: Mean
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.Collection: Heart
The day is not far off when one ordinary carrot may be pregnant with revolution.Collection: Ordinary
She was cold by nature, self-love predominating over passion; rather than being virtuous, she preferred to have her pleasures all to herself.Collection: Passion
When lovers kiss on the cheeks, it is because they are searching, feeling for one another's lips. Lovers are made by a kiss.Collection: Kissing
If something's just, I'll let myself be hacked to bits for it.Collection: Ifs
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.Collection: Fire
Oh, the fools, like a lot of good little schoolboys, scared to death of anything they've been taught is wrong!Collection: Littles
Let us eat, drink and satisfy our coarse appetites, but let us keep our souls sacred and apart.Collection: Soul
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.Collection: Tyrants
Sin ought to be something exquisite, my dear boy.Collection: Boys
I do not despair in the least of ultimate triumph. I repeat it with intense conviction.Collection: Despair
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.Collection: People
A ruined man fell from her hands like a ripe fruit, to lie rotting on the ground.Collection: Lying
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!Collection: Evil
Inability, human incapacity, is the only boundary to an art.Collection: Art
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.Collection: Jobs
Art is a corner of creation seen through a temperament.Collection: Art
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.Collection: Feelings
Why then should money be blamed for all the dirt and crimes it causes? For is love less filthy -- love which creates life?Collection: Dirt
They talked so, with secret hearts, without needing words, talking of other things... They could have suddenly continued their confessions aloud, without ceasing to understand each other.Collection: Relationship
What will be the death of me are buillabaisses, food spiced with pimiento, shellfish, and a load of exquisite rubbish which I eat in disproportionate quantities.Collection: Rubbish
And that wreched creature without hands or feet, who had to be put to bed and fed like a child, that pitiable remnant of a man, whose almost vanished life was nothing more than one scream of pain, cried out in furious indignation: 'What a fool one must be to go and kill oneself!' " - 'Joy of LifeCollection: Pain
Has science ever retreated? No! It is Catholicism which has always retreated before her, and will always be forced to retreat.Collection: Atheism
When a peasant begins to feel the need for instruction, he usually becomes fiercely calculating.Collection: Needs
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.Collection: Confusion
Paris flared -- Paris, which the divine sun had sown with light, and where in glory waved the great future harvest of Truth and of Justice.Collection: Light
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!Collection: Joy
The camembert with its venison scent defeats the Marolles and Limbourg dull smells; It spreads its exhalation, smothering the other scents under its surprising breath abundance.Collection: Food
These young people naturally grow up with ideas different from ours, for they are born for times when we shall no longer be here.Collection: About Growing Up
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.Collection: Firsts
Did not one spend the first half of one’s days in dreams of happiness and the second half in regrets and terrors?Collection: Firsts