Inspirational Quotations

Inspirational Quotes by Emile Zola (French Novelist)

Émile Zola (1840–1902,) fully Émile Édouard Charles Antoine Zola, was a French novelist, critic, and political activist who was the most prominent French novelist of the late 19th century. He is celebrated for his 20-volume series Les Rougon-Macquart, which is “the natural and social history of a family under the Second Empire.”

Though born in Paris, Zola did not become a French citizen until age 22. He attended school in Aix-en-Provence, where he befriended the future artist Paul Cezanne.

Zola led the life of a destitute until he took a shipping job at the publishers Hachette et Cie. This job provided him with the literary connections to begin his writing career. His first book was a collection of short stories, Contes a ninon (1864,) which preceded his first novel, La Confession de Claude (1865,) and several potboilers that helped him earn a decent living.

Zola invented a new style of fiction writing that he called Naturalism or “nature seen through a temperament.” Inspired by Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1839,) Zola tried an untried method of applying scientific principles of observation to the practice of writing fiction. The result was a 20-novel saga called Les Rougon-Macquart (1871–93.) This literary masterpiece made Zola rival Honoré de Balzac in sheer volume and comprehensiveness. Like Balzac, Zola used recurring characters, but also traced the influence of heredity as well as the environment on his characters through several generations. This ambitious and unprecedented plan took Zola 25 years to accomplish.

L’Assommoir (1877,) part of the Les Rougon-Macquart series, made Zola’s reputation as one of the literary giants of the 19th century. It made him a rich man too. Many of his other novels in the series succeeded with Zola introducing attributes of contemporary life and events never treated as sincerely before: prostitution in Nana (1880,) miners in Germinal (1885,) country life in La Terre (1887,) the Paris Commune in La Debacle (1892.)

In 1898, Zola intervened in the Dreyfus Affair, a 12-year political controversy that deeply divided French society. He took a one-year exile in London, but upon his return to Paris, died suddenly due to coal gas asphyxiation caused by a blocked chimney flue. Even though his death was formally determined to be a tragic accident, conspiracy theories suggest that somebody opposed to his political activism in the Dreyfus Affair arranged to have the chimney blocked.

More: Wikipedia READ: Works by Emile Zola

I am an artist… I am here to live out loud.
Emile Zola
Topics: Art, Life and Living, The Artist, Worry

I am an artist… I am here to live out loud.
Emile Zola
Topics: The Artist

The artist is nothing without the gift, but the gift is nothing without work.
Emile Zola

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.
Emile Zola
Topics: Animals

A literary work is a corner of nature seen through the temperament of the writer. The novelist, is part observer, part experimenter. As observer he collects the facts, sets the point of departure, establishes the solid ground on which the characters will walk …. Then the experimenter appears and institutes the experiment. I mean, causes the characters to move in a given story in order to show that the succession or order of facts will be such as is required by the determination of the phenomena under study.
Emile Zola

If you ask me, what I have come to do in this world, I who am an artist, I will reply: I am here to live my life out loud.
Emile Zola

The truth is on the march and nothing will stop it.
Emile Zola
Topics: Truth

Through the centuries, the history of peoples is but a lesson in mutual tolerance.
Emile Zola
Topics: Tolerance

There are two men inside the The Artist poet and the craftsman. One is born a poet. One becomes a craftsman.
Emile Zola
Topics: The Artist

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.
Emile Zola
Topics: Reason, Thought, Truth

Civilization will not attain to its perfection until the last stone from the last church falls on the last priest.
Emile Zola
Topics: Civilization

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