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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Dirt has been shrewdly termed "misplaced material.
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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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His universal compassion was due less to natural instinct, than to a profound conviction, a sum of thoughts that in the course of living had filtered through to his heart: for in the nature of man, as in rock, there may be channels hollowed by the dropping of water, and these can never be destroyed.
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The rich's paradise was created by the poor's hell.
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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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You would have imagined her at one moment a maniac, at another a queen.
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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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Nothing awakens reminiscence like an aroma.
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A day will come when there will be no battlefields, but markets opening to commerce and minds opening to ideas.
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Joie est mon caractere, C'est la faute a Voltaire; Misere est mon trousseau C'est la faute a Rousseau. [Joy is my character, 'Tis the fault of Voltaire; Misery is my trousseau 'Tis the fault of Rousseau.] - Gavroche
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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 smiles she leads the crowd, The somber human troop.
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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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All animals are to be found in men and each of theme exists in some man, sometimes several at the time.
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To love or have loved, that is enough. Ask nothing further. There is no other pearl to be found in the dark folds of life.
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Winter is on my head, but eternal spring is in my heart. The nearer I approach the end, the plainer I hear around me the immortal symphonies of the worlds which invite me. . . . For half a century I have been writing thoughts in prose, verse, history, drama, romance, tradition, satire, ode, and song. I have tried them all, but I feel I have not said a thousandth part of that which is within me. When I go down to the grave, I can say "I have finished my day's work," but I cannot say "I have finished my life's work."
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Youth is the future smiling at a stranger, which is itself.
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He who contemplates the depths of Paris is seized with vertigo. Nothing is more fantastic. Nothing is more tragic. Nothing is more sublime.
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Being good is easy, what is difficult is being just.
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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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I believe, sir, in all the progress. Air navigation is the result of the oceanic navigation: from water the human has to pass in the air. Everywhere where creation will be breathable to him, the human will penetrate into the creation. Our only limit is life.
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While contemplating the bride, and eyeing the cake of soap, he muttered between his teeth: 'Tuesday. It was not Tuesday. Was it Tuesday? Perhaps it was Tuesday. Yes, it was Tuesday.' No one has ever discovered to what this monologue referred. Yes, perchance, this monologue had some connection with the last occasion on which he had dined, three days before, for it was now Friday.
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Hypocrisy is nothing, in fact, but a horrible hopefulness.
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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.