Victor Hugo Quotes
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Genius is a promontory jutting out into the infinite.
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A poet who is a bad man is a degraded being, baser and more culpable than a bad man who is not a poet.
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No one can keep a secret better than a child.
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To commit the least possible sin is the law for man. To live without sin is the dream of an angel. Everything terrestrial is subject to sin. Sin is a gravitation.
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He who opens a school door, closes a prison.
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The flesh is the surface of the unknown.
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Sleep comes more easily than it returns.
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Perseverance, secret of all triumphs.
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The learned man knows that he is ignorant.
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A war between Europeans is a civil war.
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Thought is the labor of the intellect, reverie is its pleasure.
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If you don't build castles in the air you won't build anything on the ground.
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The ox suffers, the cart complains.
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Thought is more than a right - it is the very breath of man. Whoever fetters thought attacks man himself. To speak, to write, to publish, are things, so far as the right is concerned, absolutely identical. They are the ever-enlarging circles of intelligence in action; they are the sonorous waves of thought.
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Change your opinions, keep to your principles; change your leaves, keep intact your roots.
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What Shakespeare was able to do in English he would certainly not have done in French.
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There is one thing stronger than all the armies in the world, and that is an idea whose time as come.
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The reduction of the universe to the compass of a single being, and the extension of a single being until it reaches God - that is love. Love is the salute of the angels to the stars. How sad is the heart when rendered sad by love! How great is the void created by the absence of the being who alone fills the world.
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Almost all our desires, when examined, contain something too shameful to reveal.
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A noble soul and real poetic talent are almost always inseparable.
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Short as life is, we make it still shorter by the careless waste of time.
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People do not lack strength; they lack will.
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Verse in itself does not constitute poetry. Verse is only an elegant vestment for a beautiful form. Poetry can express itself in prose, but it does so more perfectly under the grace and majesty of verse. It is poetry of soul that inspires noble sentiments and noble actions as well as noble writings.
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All the forces in the world are not so powerful as an idea whose time has come.