Victor Hugo Quotes
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Happiness lies for those who cry, those who hurt, those who have searched, and those who have tried for only they can appreciate the importance of people who have touched their lives.
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Winter changes into stone the water of heaven and the heart of man.
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Monastic incarceration is castration.
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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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Lever à six, coucher à dix,Dîner à dix, souper à six,Font vivre l'homme dix fois dix.
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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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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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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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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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The straight line, a respectable optical illusion which ruins many a man.
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One drop of wine is enough to redden a whole glass of water.
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Love is like a tree, it grows of its own accord, it puts down deep roots into our whole being.
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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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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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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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Revolutions spring not from accident, but from necessity. A revolution is a return from the factitious to the real. It takes place because it must.
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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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He had slipped, climbed, rolled, searched, walked, persevered, that is all. Such is the secret of all triumphs.
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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.
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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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What makes night within us may leave stars.
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No man is more unhappy than the one who is never in adversity; the greatest affliction of life is never to be afflicted.
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A sewer is a cynic. It tells All.