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Each of our passions, even love, has a stomach that must not be overloaded. We must in everything write the word 'finis' in time; we must restrain ourselves, when it becomes urgent; we must draw the bolt on the appetite, play a fantasia on the violin, then break the strings with our own hand. The Wise man is he who knows when and how to stop.
Victor Hugo
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Genius is a promontory jutting out into the infinite.
Victor Hugo
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To love another person is to see the face of God.
Victor Hugo
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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.
Victor Hugo
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No one can keep a secret better than a child.
Victor Hugo
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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.
Victor Hugo
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The flesh is the surface of the unknown.
Victor Hugo
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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.
Victor Hugo
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He who opens a school door, closes a prison.
Victor Hugo
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A war between Europeans is a civil war.
Victor Hugo
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The learned man knows that he is ignorant.
Victor Hugo
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If you don't build castles in the air you won't build anything on the ground.
Victor Hugo
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Perseverance, secret of all triumphs.
Victor Hugo
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Sleep comes more easily than it returns.
Victor Hugo
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Thought is the labor of the intellect, reverie is its pleasure.
Victor Hugo
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Change your opinions, keep to your principles; change your leaves, keep intact your roots.
Victor Hugo
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Short as life is, we make it still shorter by the careless waste of time.
Victor Hugo
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My childhood began, as everybody's childhood begins, with prejudices. Man finds prejudices beside his cradle, puts them from him a little in the course of his career, and often, alas! takes to them again in his old age.
Victor Hugo
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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.
Victor Hugo
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Conscience is God present in man.
Victor Hugo
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A noble soul and real poetic talent are almost always inseparable.
Victor Hugo
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What Shakespeare was able to do in English he would certainly not have done in French.
Victor Hugo
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People do not lack strength; they lack will.
Victor Hugo
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All the forces in the world are not so powerful as an idea whose time has come.
Victor Hugo
