Victor Hugo Quotes
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Every idea must have a visible enfolding.
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In joined hands there is still some token of hope, in the clenched fist none.
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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. It is the cloud which thunders around everything that shines. Fame must have enemies, as light must have gnats. Do no bother yourself about it; disdain. Keep your mind serene as you keep your life clear.
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It is in the name of Moses that Bellarmin thunderstrikes Galileo; and this great vulgarizer of the great seeker Copernicus, Galileo, the old man of truth, the magian of the heavens, was reduced to repeating on his knees word for word after the inquisitor this formula of shame: "Corde sincera et fide non ficta abjuro maledico et detestor supradictos errores et hereses." Falsehood put an ass's hood on science.
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To rove about, musing, that is to say loitering, is, for a philosopher, a good way of spending time.
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Science says the first word on everything, and the last word on nothing.
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Nothing awakens reminiscence like an aroma.
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Out Milky Way is the dwelling; the nebulae are the city.
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There are many tongues to talk, and but few heads to think.
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Teach the ignorant as much as you can; society is culpable in not providing a free education for all and it must answer for the night which it produces. If the soul is left in darkness sins will be committed. The guilty one is not he who commits the sin, but he who causes the darkness.
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It was SHE. Whoever has loved knows all the radiant meaning contained in the three letters of this word ‘she.
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Waterloo is a battle of the first rank won by a captain of the second.
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These Greek capitals, black with age, and quite deeply graven in the stone, with I know not what signs peculiar to Gothic calligraphy imprinted upon their forms and upon their attitudes, as though with the purpose of revealing that it had been a hand of the Middle Ages which had inscribed them there, and especially the fatal and melancholy meaning contained in them, struck the author deeply.
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The onward march of the human race requires that the heights around it constantly blaze with noble lessons of courage. Deeds of daring dazzle history and form one of man's guiding lights.
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Genius is rare because the means of becoming one have not been available.
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It is very fortunate that kings cannot err. Hence their contradictions never perplex us.
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Mettre tout en équilibre, c'est bien; mettre tout en harmonie, c'est mieux.
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In short, I am doing what I can, I suffer with the same universal suffering, and I try to assuage it, I possess only the puny forces of a man, and I cry to all: “Help me!
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Love, thine is the future. Death, I use thee, but I hate thee. Citizens, there shall be in the future neither darkness nor thunderbolts; neither ferocious ignorance nor blood for blood.
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Mirrors, those revealers of the truth, are hated; that does not prevent them from being of use.
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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.
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One of the magnanimities of woman is to yield.
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People do not read stupidities with impunity.
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M. Mabeuf’s political opinion was a passionate fondness for plants, and a still greater one for books. He had, like everybody else, his termination in ist, without which nobody could have lived in those times, but he was neither a royalist, nor a Bonapartist, nor a chartist, nor an Orleanist, nor an anarchist; he was an old-bookist.