Emile Zola

"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."

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Source: Emile Zola (1993). “Germinal”, Oxford University Press, USA

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Emile Zola

Emile Zola

Novelist

Emile Zola was a French novelist known for his influential works on social realism, particularly 'Germinal', which critiques class struggles.

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Emile Zola Novelist

"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."

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