Victor Hugo Quotes
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In love, such a word, whispered, is a mysterious kiss of the soul to the soul.
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A language does not become fixed. The human intellect is always on the march, or, if you prefer, in movement, and languages with it.
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I'd rather be hissed at for a good verse, than applauded for a bad one.
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It is in the name of Moses that Bellarmin thunderstrikes Galileo; and this great vulgarizer of the great seeker Copernicus, Galileo, the old man of truth, the magian of the heavens, was reduced to repeating on his knees word for word after the inquisitor this formula of shame: "Corde sincera et fide non ficta abjuro maledico et detestor supradictos errores et hereses." Falsehood put an ass's hood on science.
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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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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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The greatest blunders, like the thickest ropes, are often compounded of a multitude of strands. Take the rope apart, separate it into the small threads that compose it, and you can break them one by one. You think, That is all there was! But twist them all together and you have something tremendous.
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Que l'avenir soit un orient au lieu d'être un couchant, c'est la consolation de l'homme.
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Dieu s'est fait homme; soit. Le diable s'est fait femme!
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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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Yes, instruction! Light! Light! Everything comes from light, and to everything it returns.
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The rich's paradise was created by the poor's hell.
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We are given up to those gods, those monsters, those giants, — our thoughts.
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They say love is blindness of heart; I say not to love is blindness.
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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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He loved books; books are cold but safe friends.
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Sometimes he used a spade in his garden, and sometimes he read and wrote. He had but one name for these two kinds of labor; he called them gardening. ‘The Spirit is a garden,’ said he.
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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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Out Milky Way is the dwelling; the nebulae are the city.
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Being good is easy, what is difficult is being just.
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Babylon violated diminishes Alexander; Rome enslaved diminishes Caesar; massacred Jerusalem diminishes Titus. Tyranny follows the tyrant. Woe to the man who leaves behind a shadow that bears his form.
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Seeing so much poverty everywhere makes me think that God is not rich. He gives the appearance of it, but I suspect some financial difficulties.
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Die, very good, but do not make others die. Suicides like the one which is about to take place here are sublime, but suicide is restricted, and does not allow of extension; and so soon as it affects your neighbors, suicide becomes murder.
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Diamonds are found only in the dark bowels of the earth; truths are found only in the depths of thought. It seemed to him that after descending into those depths after long groping in the blackest of this darkness, he had at last found one of these diamonds, one of these truths, and that he held it in his hand; and it blinded him to look at it.