Victor Hugo Quotes
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Genius is rare because the means of becoming one have not been available.
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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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The mother...swinging the children by pulling on a length of string, while at the same time she kept and eye on them with that protective watchfulness, half animal, half angelic, which is the quality of motherhood.
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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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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 tempest ceases, a cyclone passes over, a wind dies down, a broken mast can be replaced, a leak can be stopped, a fire extinguished, but what will become of this enormous brute of bronze?
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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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True or false, that which is said of men often occupies as important a place in their lives, and above all in their destinies, as that which they do.
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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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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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What happened between those two beings? Nothing. They were adoring one another.
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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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In the animal world no creature born to be a dove turns into a scavenger. This happens only among men.
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God became man, granted. The devil became a woman.
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How frightened hypocrisy hastens to defend itself.
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I think, therefore I doubt.
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You preserve your shame but you kill your glory.
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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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A few feet under the ground reigns so profound a silence, and yet so much tumult on the surface!
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Friendship exists outside our modern economy of scarcity... It's not about apportioning vanishing resources of time and energy. Friendship is a blessed relic of the ancient economy of the gift, and the time freely given to people dear to you actually creates magical abundance.
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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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Emergencies have always been necessary to progress. It was darkness which produced the lamp. It was fog that produced the compass. It was hunger that drove us to exploration. And it took a depression to teach us the real value of a job.
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I represent a party which does not yet exist: the party Revolution-Civilization. This party will make the twentieth century. There will issue from it first the United States of Europe, then the United States of the World.
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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.