Victor Hugo Quotes
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If you want to civilize a man, begin with his grandmother.
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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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You preserve your shame but you kill your glory.
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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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There is but one way of refusing To-morrow, that is to die.
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He was fond of books, for they are cool and sure friends.
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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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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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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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If the soul is left in darkness, sins will be committed. The guilty one is not he who commits the sin, but the one who causes the darkness.
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But secondly you say 'society must exact vengeance, and society must punish'. Wrong on both counts. Vengeance comes from the individual and punishment from God.
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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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She was sad with an obscure sadness of which she had not the secret herself. There was in her whole person the stupor of a life ended but never commenced.
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A cannonball travels only two thousand miles an hour; light travels two hundred thousand miles a second. Such is the superiority of Jesus Christ over Napoleon.
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A woman's best qualities are harmful if undiluted with prudence.
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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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I'd rather be hissed at for a good verse, than applauded for a bad one.
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Loving is almost a substitute for thinking. Love is a burning forgetfulness of all other things. How shall we ask passion to be logical?
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People weighed down with troubles do not look back; they know only too well that misfortune stalks them.
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I think, therefore I doubt.
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It is the peculiarity of grief to bring out the childish side of man.
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God became man, granted. The devil became a woman.
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Nobody knows like a woman how to say things at the same time sweet and profound. Sweetness and depth, this is all of woman; this is all of Heaven.
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Nothing is really small; whoever is open to the deep penetration of nature knows this.