Victor Hugo Quotes
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There are people who observe the rules of honor as one observes the stars, from a great distance.
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Do you know what friendship is?' he asked. 'Yes,' replied the gypsy; 'it is to be brother and sister; two souls which touch without mingling, two fingers on one hand.' 'And love?' pursued Gringoire. 'Oh! love!' said she, and her voice trembled, and her eye beamed. 'That is to be two and to be but one. A man and a woman mingled into one angel. It is heaven.
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You who suffer because you love, love still more. To die of love, is to live by it.
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No man is more unhappy than the one who is never in adversity; the greatest affliction of life is never to be afflicted.
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In the animal world no creature born to be a dove turns into a scavenger. This happens only among men.
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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.
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Dirt has been shrewdly termed "misplaced material.
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God in his harmony has equal ends For cedar that resists and reed that bends; For good it is a woman sometimes rules, Holds in her hand the power, and manners, schools, And laws, and mind; succeeding master proud, With gentle voice and smil.
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There comes an hour when protest no longer suffices; after philosophy there must be action; the strong hand finishes what the idea has sketched.
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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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It is those books which a man possesses but does not read which constitute the most suspicious evidence against him.
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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.
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Cheerfulness is like money well expended in charity; the more we dispense of it, the greater our possession.
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People do not read stupidities with impunity.
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One cannot be a good historian of the outward, visible world without giving some thought to the hidden, private life of ordinary people; and on the other hand one cannot be a good historian of this inner life without taking into account outward events where these are relevant.
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The holy law of Jesus Christ governs our civilisation, but it does not yet permeate it.
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Nothing can be sadder or more profound than to see a thousand things for the first and last time. To journey is to be born and die each minute...All the elements of life are in constant flight from us, with darkness and clarity intermingled, the vision and the eclipse; we look and hasten, reaching out our hands to clutch; every happening is a bend in the road...and suddenly we have grown old. We have a sense of shock and gathering darkness; ahead is a black doorway; the life that bore us is a flagging horse, and a veiled stranger is waiting in the shadows to unharness us.
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We are given up to those gods, those monsters, those giants, — our thoughts.
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Hypocrisy is nothing, in fact, but a horrible hopefulness.
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That men saw his mask, but the bishop saw his face. That men saw his life, but the bishop saw his conscience.
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To rove about, musing, that is to say loitering, is, for a philosopher, a good way of spending time, especially in that kind of mock rurality, ugly but odd, and partaking of two natures, which surrounds certain large cities, particularly Paris.
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Women are more credulous than men.
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There is will in the thought, there is none in the dream. The dream, which is completely spontaneous, takes and keeps, even in the gigantic and the ideal, the form of our mind. Nothing springs more directly and more sincerely from the very bottom of our souls than our unreflected and indefinite aspirations towards the splendours of destiny.
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The wind of revolutions is not tractable.