Victor Hugo Quotes
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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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Let us study things that are no more. It is necessary to understand them, if only to avoid them.
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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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La musique...est la vapeur de l’art. Elle est à la poésie ce que la rêverie est à la pensée, ce que le fluide est au liquide, ce que l’océan des nuées est à l’océan des ondes.
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For there are many great deeds done in the small struggles of life.
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The convent is supreme egotism resulting in supreme self-denial.
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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?
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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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She might have melted a heart of stone, but nothing can melt a heart of wood.
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His whole life was now summed up in two words: absolute uncertainty within an impenetrable fog.
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Philosophy is the microscope of thought.
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Every bird which flies has the thread of the infinite in its claw.
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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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In joined hands there is still some token of hope, in the clenched fist none.
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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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True thinkers are characterized by a blending of clearness and mystery.
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A man trying to escape never thinks himself sufficiently concealed.
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I repeat, whether we be Italians or Frenchmen, misery concerns us all.
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The day that a woman who is passing before you sheds a light upon you as she goes, you are lost, you love. You have then but one thing to do: to think of her so earnestly that she will be compelled to think of you.
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Idleness, pleasure, what abysses! To do nothing is a dreary course to take, be sure of it. To live idle upon the substance of society! To be useless, that is to say, noxious! This leads straight to the lowest depth of misery.
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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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Nothing is more imminent than the impossible . . . what we must always foresee is the unforeseen.
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Superstitions, bigotries, hypocrisies, prejudices, these phantoms, phantoms though they be, cling to life; they have teeth and nails in their shadowy substance, and we must grapple with them individually and make war on them without truce; for it is one of humanity's inevitabilities to be condemned to eternal struggle with phantoms.
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There are no trifles in the human story, no trifling leaves on the tree.