Victor Hugo Quotes
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Yes, instruction! Light! Light! Everything comes from light, and to everything it returns.
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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.
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We are given up to those gods, those monsters, those giants, — our thoughts.
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A woman's best qualities are harmful if undiluted with prudence.
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Love, thine is the future. Death, I use thee, but I hate thee. Citizens, there shall be in the future neither darkness nor thunderbolts; neither ferocious ignorance nor blood for blood.
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I write with one hand, but I fight with both.
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Nature is pitiless; she never withdraws her flowers, her music, her fragrance, and her sunlight from before human cruelty or suffering.
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Let us leave to the brain what belongs to it, and agree that the work of the men of genius is of the superhuman, the offspring of man.
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Not being heard is no reason for silence.
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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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As for methods of prayer, all of them are good as long as they are sincere.
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The rich's paradise was created by the poor's hell.
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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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When, like an Emir of tyrannic power, Sirius appears, and on the horizon black Bids countless stars pursue their mighty track.
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A saint addicted to excessive self-abnegation is a dangerous associate; he may infect you with poverty, and a stiffening of those joints which are needed for advancement-in a word, with more renunciation than you care for-and so you flee the contagion.
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Where would the shout of love begin, if not from the summit of sacrifice?
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Dirt has been shrewdly termed "misplaced material.
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Nothing discernible to the eye of the spirit is more brilliant or obscure than man; nothing is more formidable, complex, mysterious, and infinite. There is a prospect greater than the sea, and it is the sky; there is a prospect greater than the sky, and it is the human soul.
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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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The poor man shuddered, overflowed with an angelic joy; he declared in his transport that this would last through life; he said to himself that he really had not suffered enough to deserve such radiant happiness, and he thanked God, in the depths of his soul, for having permitted that he, a miserable man, should be so loved by this innocent being.
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Sire, you are looking at a plain man, and I am looking at a great man. Each of us may benefit.
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God will bless you,' said he, 'you are an angel since you take care of the flowers.' 'No,' she replied. 'I am the devil, but that's all the same to me.
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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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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.