Victor Hugo quotes:

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  • Have courage for the great sorrows of life and patience for the small ones; and when you have laboriously accomplished your daily task, go to sleep in peace.

  • To give thanks in solitude is enough. Thanksgiving has wings and goes where it must go. Your prayer knows much more about it than you do.

  • Dear God! how beauty varies in nature and art. In a woman the flesh must be like marble; in a statue the marble must be like flesh.

  • The greatest happiness of life is the conviction that we are loved; loved for ourselves, or rather, loved in spite of ourselves.

  • Our life dreams the Utopia. Our death achieves the Ideal.

  • One is not idle because one is absorbed. There is both visible and invisible labor. To contemplate is to toil, to think is to do. The crossed arms work, the clasped hands act. The eyes upturned to Heaven are an act of creation.

  • Short as life is, we make it still shorter by the careless waste of time.

  • He, who every morning plans the transactions of the day, and follows that plan, carries a thread that will guide him through a labyrinth of the most busy life.

  • I met in the street a very poor young man who was in love. His hat was old, his coat worn, his cloak was out at the elbows, the water passed through his shoes, - and the stars through his soul.

  • Forty is the old age of youth; fifty the youth of old age.

  • The omnipotence of evil has never resulted in anything but fruitless efforts. Our thoughts always escape from whoever tries to smother them.

  • Life is the flower for which love is the honey.

  • Jesus wept; Voltaire smiled. From that divine tear and from that human smile is derived the grace of present civilization.

  • Death has its revelations: the great sorrows which open the heart open the mind as well; light comes to us with our grief. As for me, I have faith; I believe in a future life. How could I do otherwise? My daughter was a soul; I saw this soul. I touched it, so to speak.

  • Concision in style, precision in thought, decision in life.

  • It is from books that wise people derive consolation in the troubles of life.

  • Music expresses that which cannot be said and on which it is impossible to be silent.

  • Each man should frame life so that at some future hour fact and his dreaming meet.

  • In the French language, there is a great gulf between prose and poetry; in English, there is hardly any difference. It is a splendid privilege of the great literary languages Greek, Latin, and French that they possess a prose. English has not this privilege. There is no prose in English.

  • The supreme happiness of life is the conviction that we are loved; loved for ourselves, or rather in spite of ourselves.

  • A faith is a necessity to a man. Woe to him who believes in nothing.

  • Son, brother, father, lover, friend. There is room in the heart for all the affections, as there is room in heaven for all the stars.

  • I am an intelligent river which has reflected successively all the banks before which it has flowed by meditating only on the images offered by those changing shores.

  • Life's greatest happiness is to be convinced we are loved.

  • Nature has made a pebble and a female. The lapidary makes the diamond, and the lover makes the woman.

  • One sometimes says: 'He killed himself because he was bored with life.' One ought rather to say: 'He killed himself because he was bored by lack of life.'

  • There is one thing stronger than all the armies in the world, and that is an idea whose time as come.

  • Love, in the eyes of the world, is either a carnal appetite or a vague fancy, which possession extinguishes or absence destroys. That is why it is commonly said, with a strange abuse of words, that passion does not endure.

  • The animal is ignorant of the fact that he knows. The man is aware of the fact that he is ignorant.

  • Because one doesn't like the way things are is no reason to be unjust towards God.

  • Initiative is doing the right thing without being told.

  • Be like the bird who, pausing in her flight awhile on boughs too slight, feels them give way beneath her, and yet sings, knowing she hath wings.

  • As the purse is emptied, the heart is filled.

  • The wicked envy and hate; it is their way of admiring.

  • The ideal and the beautiful are identical; the ideal corresponds to the idea, and beauty to form; hence idea and substance are cognate.

  • Religions do a useful thing: they narrow God to the limits of man. Philosophy replies by doing a necessary thing: it elevates man to the plane of God.

  • Society is a republic. When an individual tries to lift themselves above others, they are dragged down by the mass, either by ridicule or slander.

  • A creditor is worse than a slave-owner; for the master owns only your person, but a creditor owns your dignity, and can command it.

  • Amnesty is as good for those who give it as for those who receive it. It has the admirable quality of bestowing mercy on both sides.

  • Verse in itself does not constitute poetry. Verse is only an elegant vestment for a beautiful form. Poetry can express itself in prose, but it does so more perfectly under the grace and majesty of verse. It is poetry of soul that inspires noble sentiments and noble actions as well as noble writings.

  • We say that slavery has vanished from European civilization, but this is not true. Slavery still exists, but now it applies only to women and its name is prostitution.

  • A society that admits misery, a humanity that admits war, seem to me an inferior society and a debased humanity; it is a higher society and a more elevated humanity at which I am aiming - a society without kings, a humanity without barriers.

  • Freedom in art, freedom in society, this is the double goal towards which all consistent and logical minds must strive.

  • To love beauty is to see light.

  • To rise from error to truth is rare and beautiful.

  • A great artist is a great man in a great child.

  • What is history? An echo of the past in the future; a reflex from the future on the past.

  • As a means of contrast with the sublime, the grotesque is, in our view, the richest source that nature can offer.

  • We see past time in a telescope and present time in a microscope. Hence the apparent enormities of the present.

  • Peace is the virtue of civilization. War is its crime.

  • Strong and bitter words indicate a weak cause.

  • He who is not capable of enduring poverty is not capable of being free.

  • Hope is the word which God has written on the brow of every man.

  • It is the end. But of what? The end of France? No. The end of kings? Yes.

  • The flesh is the surface of the unknown.

  • Indigestion is charged by God with enforcing morality on the stomach.

  • He who opens a school door, closes a prison.

  • Change your opinions, keep to your principles; change your leaves, keep intact your roots.

  • Close by the Rights of Man, at the least set beside them, are the Rights of the Spirit.

  • When God desires to destroy a thing, he entrusts its destruction to the thing itself. Every bad institution of this world ends by suicide.

  • No one knows like a woman how to say things which are at once gentle and deep.

  • To love another person is to see the face of God.

  • An invasion of armies can be resisted, but not an idea whose time has come.

  • There is nothing like a dream to create the future.

  • I love all men who think, even those who think otherwise than myself.

  • There have been in this century only one great man and one great thing: Napoleon and liberty. For want of the great man, let us have the great thing.

  • A poet who is a bad man is a degraded being, baser and more culpable than a bad man who is not a poet.

  • The first symptom of love in a young man is timidity; in a girl boldness.

  • Many great actions are committed in small struggles.

  • The last resort of kings, the cannonball. The last resort of the people, the paving stone.

  • The three great problems of this century; the degradation of man in the proletariat, the subjection of women through hunger, the atrophy of the child by darkness.

  • Nations, like stars, are entitled to eclipse. All is well, provided the light returns and the eclipse does not become endless night. Dawn and resurrection are synonymous. The reappearance of the light is the same as the survival of the soul.

  • One can resist the invasion of an army but one cannot resist the invasion of ideas.

  • When a man understands the art of seeing, he can trace the spirit of an age and the features of a king even in the knocker on a door.

  • Taste is the common sense of genius.

  • What would be ugly in a garden constitutes beauty in a mountain.

  • When a woman is talking to you, listen to what she says with her eyes.

  • Nothing else in the world... not all the armies... is so powerful as an idea whose time has come.

  • All the forces in the world are not so powerful as an idea whose time has come.

  • There is neither a foreign war nor a civil war; there is only just and unjust war.

  • A day will come when there will be no battlefields, but markets opening to commerce and minds opening to ideas.

  • Let us show that, if the people abandon the republicans, the republicans do not abandon the people.

  • True or false, that which is set of men often occupies as important a place in their lives, and above all in their destinies, as that which they do.

  • The goodness of the mother is written in the gaiety of the child.

  • Do not inquire he name if him who asks a shelter of you. The very man who's embarrassed by his name is the one who needs shelter

  • Should we continue to look upwards? Is the light we can see in the sky one of those which will presently be extinguished? The ideal is terrifying to beholdbrilliant but threatened on all sides by the dark forces that surround it: nevertheless, no more in danger than a star in the jaws of the clouds.

  • When the heart is dry the eye is dry.

  • People are unlearning certain things, and they do well, provided that, while unlearning them they learn this: There is no vacuum in the human heart. Certain demolitions take place, and it is well that they do, but on condition that they are followed by reconstructions.

  • Phoebus de Chateaupers likewise came to a 'tragic end': he married.

  • Do not economize on the hymeneal rites; do not prune them of their splendor, nor split farthings on the day when you are radiant. A wedding is not house-keeping.

  • Ladies, a second piece of advice--do not marry; marriage is a graft; it may take hold or not. Shun the risk.

  • That you are happy, that Monsieur Pontmercy has Cosette, that youth espouses mourning, that there are about you, my children, lilacs and nightingales, that your life is a beautiful lawn in the sunshine, that all the enchantments of heaven fill your souls, and now, that I who am good for nothing, that I die; surely all this is well.

  • With the exercise of a little care, the nettle could be made useful; it is neglected and it becomes hurtful. It is exterminated. How many men resemble the nettle!" He added with a pause: "Remember this, my friends: there are no such things as bad plants or bad men. There are only bad cultivators.

  • Equality, citizens, is not the whole of society on a level, a society of tall blades of grass and small oaks, or a number of entangled jealousies. It is, legally speaking, every aptitude having the same opportunity for a career; politically all consciences having the same right. Equality has an organ, gratuitous and compulsory education. We must begin with the right to the alphabet.

  • The provincial dandy wore the longest of spurs and the fiercest of mustaches.

  • Do you know what friendship is?' he asked.'Yes,' replied the gypsy; 'it is to be brother and sister; two souls which touch without mingling, two fingers on one hand.''And love?' pursued Gringoire.'Oh! love!' said she, and her voice trembled, and her eye beamed. 'That is to be two and to be but one. A man and a woman mingled into one angel. It is heaven.

  • All this ferment was public, we might almost say tranquil.The imminent insurrection gathered its storm calmly in the face of the government. No singularity was lacking in this crisis, still subterranean, but already perceptible. The middle class talked quietly with workingmen about the preparations. They would say, "How is the uprising coming along?" in the same tone in which they would have said, " How's your wife?

  • There is a point, moreover, at which the unfortunate and the infamous are associated and confounded in a single word, Les Miserables; whose fault is it? And then, is it not when the fall is lowest that charity ought to be greatest?

  • He had to accept the fate of every newcomer to a small town where there are plenty of tongues that gossip and few minds that think.

  • Every good quality runs into a defect; economy borders on avarice, the generous are not far from the prodigal, the brave man is close to the bully; he who is very pious is slightly sanctimonious; there are just as many vices to virtue as there are holes in the mantle of Diogenes.

  • We all know the artfulness with which a dropped coin hides itself, and the job we have to find it again. There are thoughts which play the same trick on us, rolling into a buried corner of our minds; and there it is, they've gone forever, we can't put our finger on them.

  • Common right is nought but the protection of all radiating over the right of each. This protection of all is termed Fraternity. The point of intersection of all these aggregated sovereignties is called Society. This intersection being a junction, this point is a knot. Hence comes what is called the social tie."

  • Success is an ugly thing. Men are deceived by its false resemblances to merit.... They confound the brilliance of the firmament with the star-shaped footprints of a duck in the mud."

  • Just see how idiotic one can be! One reckons without the good God."

  • Never had the sky been more studded with stars and more charming, the trees more trembling, the odor of the grass more penetrating; never had the birds fallen asleep among the leaves with a sweeter noise; never had all the harmonies of universal serenity responded more thoroughly to the inward music of love; never had Marius been more captivated, more happy, more ecstatic."

  • All the human and animal manure which the world wastes, if returned to the land, instead of being thrown into the sea, would suffice to nourish the world."

  • There comes an hour when protest no longer suffices; after philosophy there must be action; the strong hand finishes what the idea has sketched."

  • The infinite space that each man carries within himself, wherein despairingly he contrasts the movement of his spirit with the acts of his life, is and overpowering thing."

  • The memory of an absent person shines in the deepest recesses of the heart, shining the more brightly the more wholly its object has vanished: a light on the horizon of the despairing, darkened spirit; a star gleaming in our inward night."

  • There exists, at the bottom of all abasement and misfortune, a last extreme which rebels and joins battle with the forces of law and respectability in a desperate struggle, waged partly by cunning and partly by violence, at once sick and ferocious, in which it attacks the prevailing social order with the pin-pricks of vice and the hammer-blows of crime.

  • A saint addicted to excessive self-abnegation is a dangerous associate; he may infect you with poverty, and a stiffening of those joints which are needed for advancement-in a word, with more renunciation than you care for-and so you flee the contagion.

  • The great acts of love are done by those who are habitually performing small acts of kindness.

  • When grace is joined with wrinkles, it is adorable. There is an unspeakable dawn in happy old age.

  • There are fathers who do not love their children; there is no grandfather who does not adore his grandson.

  • The aim of art is almost divine: to bring to life again if it is writing history, to create if it is writing poetry.

  • To know how to distinguish the agitation arising from covetousness, from the agitation arising from principles, to fight the one and aid the other, in this lies the genius and the power of great revolutionary leaders.

  • It is a terrible thing to be happy! How pleased we are with it! How all-sufficient we think it! How, being in possession of the false aim of life, happiness, we forget the true aim, duty!

  • So a voice in the mountain is enough to let loose an avalanche. A word too much may be followed by a caving in. If the word had not been spoken, it would not have happened.

  • A mother's arms are made of tenderness and children sleep soundly in them.

  • Love is a portion of the soul itself, and it is of the same nature as the celestial breathing of the atmosphere of paradise.

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