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The Joy of Life QUOTES

The Joy of Life QUOTES

1 " She wanted to live, and live fully, and to give life, she who loved life! What was the good of existing, if you couldn't give yourself? "

― Émile Zola , The Joy of Life

2 " 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. "

― Émile Zola , The Joy of Life

3 " 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 , The Joy of Life

4 " How the thought of meeting lost loved ones would sweeten one's last moments, how eagerly would one embrace them, and what bliss to live together once more in immortality! He suffered agonies when he considered religion's charitable lie, which compassionately conceals the terrible truth from feeble creatures. No, everything finished at death, nothing that we had loved was ever reborn, our farewells were for ever. For ever! For ever! That was the dreadful thought that carried his mind hurtling down abysses of emptiness. "

― Émile Zola , The Joy of Life

5 " The sea with its perpetual oscillation, that obstinate swell sweeping up to the cliffs twice a day, exasperated him: it was senseless force, indifferent to his grief, wearing down the same rocks for centuries while never mourning the death of a single human being. it was too vast, too cold; and he would hurry home and shut himself indoors, to feel less insignificant, less crushed between the dual infinities of sea and sky. "

― Émile Zola , The Joy of Life

6 " Her pride in self-abnegation had left her, and she accepted that her loved ones could find happiness without her help. "

― Émile Zola , The Joy of Life

7 " His was the sceptical boredom of a whole generation, no longer the romantic ennui of a Werther or a Rene lamenting the passing of old beliefs, but the boredom of the new doubting heroes, the young chemists who angrily proclaim the world intolerable because they have not immediately found life at the bottom of their test tubes. "

― Émile Zola , The Joy of Life

8 " The ground was shaking beneath their feet and they clung to the resolutions they had made in calmer moments, to avoid plunging into the abyss. "

― Émile Zola , The Joy of Life

9 " If the world is to die in misery, let it at least go out with a song on its lips, and pity for itself. "

― Émile Zola , The Joy of Life

10 " Oh, that's typical of you modern young men; you've nibbled at science and it's made you ill, because you've not been able to satisfy that old craving for the absolute that you absorbed in your nurseries. You'd like science to give you all the answers at one go, whereas we're only just beginning to understand it, and it'll probably never be anything but an eternal quest. And so you repudiate science, you fall back on religion, and religion won't have you any more. Then you relapse into pessimism...Yes, it's the disease of our age, of the end of the century: you're all inverted Werthers. "

― Émile Zola , The Joy of Life