Victor Hugo Quotes
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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.
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Every blade has two edges; he who wounds with one wounds himself with the other.
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The sewer is the conscience of the city.
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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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There shall be no slavery of the mind.
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The clouds, - the only birds that never sleep.
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The heart becomes heroic through passion. It is no longer composed of anything but what is pure; it no longer rests upon anything but what is elevated and great.
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Death belongs to God alone; by what right do men touch that unknown thing?
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Great blunders are often made, like large ropes, of a multitude of fibers. Take the cable thread by thread, take separately all the little determining motives, you break them one after another, and you say: that is all! Wind them and twist them together, they become an enormity.
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In the domain of art there is no light without heat.
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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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Such is the remorseless progression of human society, shedding lives and souls as it goes on its way. It is an ocean into which men sink who have been cast out by the law and consigned, with help most cruelly withheld, to moral death. The sea is the pitiless social darkness into which the penal system casts those it has condemned, an unfathomable waste of misery. The human soul, lost in those depths, may become a corpse. Who shall revive it?
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The left-handed are precious; they take places which are inconvenient for the rest.
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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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There are no trifles in the human story, no trifling leaves on the tree.
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I think I missed my calling. I should have been an interior decorator.
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For sight is woman-like and shuns the old.
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Reality in strong doses frightens.
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He left her. She was dissatisfied with him. He had preferred to incur her anger rather than cause her pain. He had kept all the pain for himself.
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Who then understands the reciprocal flux and reflux of the infinitely great and the infinitely small, the echoing of causes in the abysses of being, and the avalanches of creation?
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Solitude either develops the mental power, or renders men dull and vicious.
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What is said about men often has as much influence upon their lives, and especially upon their destinies, as what they do.
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The aim of art is almost divine: to bring to life again if it is writing history, to create if it is writing poetry.
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Enthusiasm is the fever of reason.