Victor Hugo Quotes
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True thinkers are characterized by a blending of clearness and mystery.
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Can human nature ever be wholly and radically transformed? Can the man whom God made good be made wicked by man? Can the soul be reshaped in its entirety by destiny and made evil because destiny is evil? Can the heart become misshapen and afflicted with ugly, incurable deformities under disproportionate misfortune, like a spinal column bent beneath a too low roof?
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The man who does not know other languages, unless he is a man of genius, necessarily has deficiencies in his ideas.
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The women laughed and wept; the crowd stamped their feet enthusiastically, for at that moment Quasimodo was really beautiful. He was handsome — this orphan, this foundling, this outcast.
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The earlier works of a man of genius are always preferred to the newer ones, in order to prove that he is going down instead of up.
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When two souls have finally found each other, there is established between them a union which begins on earth and continues forever in heaven.
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Death belongs to God alone; by what right do men touch that unknown thing?
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Mettre tout en équilibre, c'est bien; mettre tout en harmonie, c'est mieux.
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Hope is a delusion; no hand can grasp a wave or a shadow.
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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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Nothing is so stifling as symmetry. Symmetry is boredom, the quintessence of mourning. Despair yawns. There is something more terrible than a hell of suffering - a hell of boredom.
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You have enemies? Why, it is the story of every man who has done a great deed or created a new idea.
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To meditate is to labour; to think is to act. Folded arms work, closed hands perform, a gaze fixed on heaven is a toil.
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Enthusiasm is the fever of reason.
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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!
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The death agony of the barricade was about to begin.For, since the preceding evening, the two rows of houses in the Rue de la Chanvrerie had become two walls; ferocious walls, doors closed, windows closed, shutters closed. A house is an escarpment, a door is a refusal, a facade is a wall. This wall hears, sees and will not. It might open and save you. No. This wall is a judge. It gazes at you and condemns you. What dismal things are closed houses.
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When grace combines with wrinkles, it is admirable. There is an indescribable light of dawn about intensely happy old age. . . . The young person is handsome, but the old, superb.
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His whole life was now summed up in two words: absolute uncertainty within an impenetrable fog.
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Great grief is a divine and terrible radiance which transfigures the wretched.
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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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Tobacco is the plant that converts thoughts into dreams.
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The convent is supreme egotism resulting in supreme self-denial.
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God created the flirt as soon as he made the fool.
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I believe that pity is a law like justice, and that kindness is a duty like uprightness. That which is weak has a right to the kindness and pity of that which is strong. In the relations of man with the animals...there is a great ethic, scarcely perceived as yet, which will at length break through into the light, and which will be the corollary and the complement to humans ethics. Are there not here unsounded depths for the thinker? Is one to think oneself mad because one has the sentiment of universal pity in one's heart?