Victor Hugo Quotes
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Forget not, never forget that you have promised me to use this silver to become an honest man.... Jean Valjean, my brother: you belong no longer to evil, but to good. It is your soul that I am buying for you. I withdraw it from dark thoughts and from the spirit of perdition, and I give it to God!
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Ah," cried Gavroche, "what does this mean? It rains again! ...If this continues, I withdraw my subscription.
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Lever à six, coucher à dix,Dîner à dix, souper à six,Font vivre l'homme dix fois dix.
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Love is the foolishness of men, and the wisdom of God.
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Revolutions are not born of chance but of necessity.
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Wide horizons lead the soul to broad ideas; circumscribed horizons engender narrow ideas; this sometimes condemns great hearts to become small minded.Broad ideas hated by narrow ideas,-this is the very struggle of progress.
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The convent is supreme egotism resulting in supreme self-denial.
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A one-eyed man is much more incomplete than a blind man, for he knows what it is that's lacking.
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Winter changes into stone the water of heaven and the heart of man.
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They had done him the honor to take him for a madman, but had set him free on discovering that he was only a poet.
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To see so much misery everywhere, I suspect that God is not rich. He keeps up appearances, it is true, but I feel the pinch. He gives a revolution as a merchant, whose credit is low, gives a ball.
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Morality is truth in full bloom.
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Not ill? No truly, I am young, healthful, and strong; the blood flows freely in my veins; my limbs obey my will; I am robust in mind and body, constituted for a long life. Yes, all this is true; and yet, nevertheless, I have an illness, a fatal illness,-an illness given by the hand of man!
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To gaze into the depths of the sea is, in the imagination, like beholding the vast unknown, and from its most terrible point of view. The submarine gulf is analogous to the realm of night and dreams. There also is sleep, unconsciousness, or at least apparent unconsciousness, of creation. There in the awful silence and darkness, the rude first forms of life, phantomlike, demoniacal, pursue their horrible instincts.
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When people look back at their childhood or youth, their wistfulness comes from the memory, not of what their lives had been in those years, but of what life had then promised to be. The expectation of some indefinable splendor, of the unusual, the exciting, the great is an attribute of youth and the process of aging is the process of that expectations' gradual extinction. One does not have to let it happen. But that fire dies for lack of fuel, under the gray weight of disappointments.
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The straight line, a respectable optical illusion which ruins many a man.
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A house is built of logs and stone, of tiles and posts and piers; a home is built of loving deeds that stand a thousand years.
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One drop of wine is enough to redden a whole glass of water.
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Waterloo! Waterloo! Waterloo! Morne plaine!
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He had slipped, climbed, rolled, searched, walked, persevered, that is all. Such is the secret of all triumphs.
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Death belongs to God alone; by what right do men touch that unknown thing?
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Hope is a delusion; no hand can grasp a wave or a shadow.
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Work is the law of life, and to reject it as boredom is to submit to it as torment.
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We may remark in passing that to be blind and beloved may, in this world where nothing is perfect, be among the most strangely exquisite forms of happiness. The supreme happiness in life is the assurance of being loved; of being loved for oneself, even in spite of oneself; and this assurance the blind man possesses. In his affliction, to be served is to be caressed. Does he lack anything? no. Possessing love he is not deprived of light. A love, moreover, that is wholly pure. There can be no blindness where there is this certainty.