Victor Hugo Quotes
-
For, to make deserts, God, who rules mankind, Begins with kings, and ends the work by wind.
-
Let us fear ourselves. Prejudices are the real robbers; vices are the real murderers. The great dangers lie within ourselves.
-
Winter is on my head, but eternal spring is in my heart; I breathe at this hour the fragrance of the lilacs, the violets, and the roses, as at twenty years ago.
-
While contemplating the bride, and eyeing the cake of soap, he muttered between his teeth: 'Tuesday. It was not Tuesday. Was it Tuesday? Perhaps it was Tuesday. Yes, it was Tuesday.' No one has ever discovered to what this monologue referred. Yes, perchance, this monologue had some connection with the last occasion on which he had dined, three days before, for it was now Friday.
-
The mother...swinging the children by pulling on a length of string, while at the same time she kept and eye on them with that protective watchfulness, half animal, half angelic, which is the quality of motherhood.
-
A man trying to escape never thinks himself sufficiently concealed.
-
We shall not attempt to give the reader an idea of that tetrahedron nose-that horse-shoe mouth-that small left eye over-shadowed by a red bushy brow, while the right eye disappeared entirely under an enormous wart-of those straggling teeth with breaches here and there like the battlements of a fortress-of that horny lip, over which one of those teeth projected like the tusk of an elephant-of that forked chin-and, above all, of the expression diffused over the whole-that mixture of malice, astonishment, and melancholy. Let the reader, if he can, figure to himself this combination.
-
The poor man shuddered, overflowed with an angelic joy; he declared in his transport that this would last through life; he said to himself that he really had not suffered enough to deserve such radiant happiness, and he thanked God, in the depths of his soul, for having permitted that he, a miserable man, should be so loved by this innocent being.
-
Profound hearts, wise minds, take life as God makes it; it is a long trial, and unintelligible preparation for the unknown destiny.
-
Algebra applies to the clouds.
-
One of the magnanimities of woman is to yield.
-
If he had had all Peru in his pocket, he would certainly have given it to this dancer; but Gringoire had not Peru in his pocket; and besides, America was not yet discovered.
-
As with stomachs, we should pity minds that do not eat.
-
Youth is the future smiling at a stranger, which is itself.
-
Philosophy is the microscope of thought.
-
There is no vacuum in the human heart. Certain demolitions take place, and it is well that they do, but on condition that they are followed by reconstructions.
-
For sight is woman-like and shuns the old.
-
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.
-
To have lied is to have suffered.
-
The repose of darkness is deeper on the water than on the land.
-
You would have imagined her at one moment a maniac, at another a queen.
-
Mirrors, those revealers of the truth, are hated; that does not prevent them from being of use.
-
In the animal world no creature born to be a dove turns into a scavenger. This happens only among men.
-
There are no trifles in the human story, no trifling leaves on the tree.