Victor Hugo Quotes
-
Every man is a book in which God himself writes.
-
In love, such a word, whispered, is a mysterious kiss of the soul to the soul.
-
To gaze into the depths of the sea is, in the imagination, like beholding the vast unknown, and from its most terrible point of view. The submarine gulf is analogous to the realm of night and dreams. There also is sleep, unconsciousness, or at least apparent unconsciousness, of creation. There in the awful silence and darkness, the rude first forms of life, phantomlike, demoniacal, pursue their horrible instincts.
-
To introduce a new play only six weeks after another has been banned is also a way to speak one's piece to the government. It proves that art and liberty can grow back in one night under the clumsy foot which crushes them.
-
You can give without loving, but you can never love without giving. The great acts of love are done by those who are habitually performing small acts of kindness. We pardon to the extent that we love. Love is knowing that even when you are alone, you will never be lonely again. & great happiness of life is the conviction that we are loved. Loved for ourselves. & even loved in spite of ourselves.
-
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?
-
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.
-
Every idea must have a visible enfolding.
-
Dry happiness is like dry bread. We eat, but we do not dine. I wish for the superfluous, for the useless, for the extravagant, for the too much, for that which is not good for anything.
-
It is an unpleasant thing to go to bed without supper, it is a still less pleasant thing not to sup and not to know where one is to sleep.
-
Waterloo is a battle of the first rank won by a captain of the second.
-
Hypocrisy is nothing, in fact, but a horrible hopefulness.
-
Desiring always to be in mourning, he clothed himself with night.
-
The holy law of Jesus Christ governs our civilisation, but it does not yet permeate it.
-
God will bless you,' said he, 'you are an angel since you take care of the flowers.' 'No,' she replied. 'I am the devil, but that's all the same to me.
-
The word Gothic, in the sense in which it is generally employed, is wholly unsuitable, but wholly consecrated. Hence we accept it and we adopt it, like all the rest of the world, to characterize the architecture of the second half of the Middle Ages, where the ogive is the principle which succeeds the architecture of the first period, of which the semi-circle is the father.
-
...The girls chirped and chatted like uncaged warblers. They were delirious with joy... Intoxications of life’s morning! Enchanted years! The wing of a dragonfly trembles! Oh, reader, whoever you may be, do you have such memories? Have you walked in the underbrush, pushing aside branches for the charming head behind you? Have you slid laughing, down some slope wet with rain, with the woman you loved?
-
Despots play their part in the works of thinkers. Fettered words are terrible words. The writer doubles and trebles the power of his writing when a ruler imposes silence on the people. Something emerges from that enforced silence, a mysterious fullness which filters through and becomes steely in the thought.
-
Emergencies have always been necessary to progress. It was darkness which produced the lamp. It was fog that produced the compass. It was hunger that drove us to exploration. And it took a depression to teach us the real value of a job.
-
Love would never be a promise of a rose garden unless it is showered with light of faith, water of sincerity and air of passion. Sometimes we make love with our eyes. Sometimes we make love with our hands. Sometimes we make love with our bodies. Always we make love with our hearts. If I could reach up and hold a star for every time you've made me smile, the entire evening sky would be in the palm of my hand. To love another person is to see the face of God.
-
There is but one way of refusing To-morrow, that is to die.
-
The thirst for the Infinite proves infinity.
-
Idleness is a mother. She has a son, robbery, and a daughter, hunger.
-
What was more needed by this old man who divided the leisure hours of his life, where he had so little leisure, between gardening in the daytime, and contemplation at night? Was not this narrow enclosure, with the sky for a background, enough to enable him to adore God in his most beautiful as well as in his most sublime works? Indeed, is not that all, and what more can be desired? A little garden to walk, and immensity to reflect upon. At his feet something to cultivate and gather; above his head something to study and meditate upon: a few flowers on the earth, and all the stars in the sky.