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

Emile Zola

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Emile Zola
Age: 62 †
Born: 1840
Born: January 1
Died: 1902
Died: January 1
Art Critic
Essayist
Journalist
Literary Critic
Novelist
Photographer
Playwright
Poet
Political Journalist
Short Story Writer
Theatre Critic
Paris
France
Emile Edouard Charles Antoine Zola
Gravestones
Gravestone
Cemetery
Illusions
Toes
Illusion
Simply
Past

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Let us eat, drink and satisfy our coarse appetites, but let us keep our souls sacred and apart.
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Inability, human incapacity, is the only boundary to an art.
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In my view you cannot claim to have seen something until you have photographed it.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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When truth is buried, it grows. It chokes. It gathers such an explosive force that on the day it bursts out, it blows up everything with it.
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I do not despair in the least of ultimate triumph. I repeat it with intense conviction.
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The thought is a deed. Of all deeds she fertilizes the world most.
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A ruined man fell from her hands like a ripe fruit, to lie rotting on the ground.
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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.
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Oh, the fools, like a lot of good little schoolboys, scared to death of anything they've been taught is wrong!
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The vague torment of ... ambition.
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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.
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Civilization will not attain to its perfection until the last stone from the last church falls on the last priest.
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It is not I who am strong, it is reason, it is truth.
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Everything is only a dream.
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It is not necessary that one should humble oneself to deserve assistance, it is sufficient that one should suffer.
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Since the same human mire remains beneath, does not all civilization reduce itself to the superiority of smelling nice and living well?
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