Victor Hugo Quotes
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Nothing can be sadder or more profound than to see a thousand things for the first and last time. To journey is to be born and die each minute...All the elements of life are in constant flight from us, with darkness and clarity intermingled, the vision and the eclipse; we look and hasten, reaching out our hands to clutch; every happening is a bend in the road...and suddenly we have grown old. We have a sense of shock and gathering darkness; ahead is a black doorway; the life that bore us is a flagging horse, and a veiled stranger is waiting in the shadows to unharness us.
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Slowly he took out the clothes in which, ten years beforem Cosette had left Montfermeil; first the little dress, then the black scarf, then the great heavy child's shoes Cosette could still almost have worn, so small was her foot, then the vest of very thich fustian, then the knitted petticoat, the the apron with pockets, then the wool stockings.... Then his venerable white head fell on the bed, this old stoical heart broke, his face was swallowed up, so to speak, in Cosette's clothes, and anybody who had passed along the staircase at that moment would have heard irrepressible sobbing.
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Many great actions are committed in small struggles.
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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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Houses are like the human beings that inhabit them.
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Daring is the price of progress. All splendid conquests are the prize of boldness, more or less.
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It may be remarked in passing that success is an ugly thing. Men are deceived by its false resemblences to merit.
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What love commences can be finished by God alone.
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A translation in verse . . . seems to me something absurd, impossible.
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In the Twentieth Century war will be dead, the scaffold will be dead, hatred will be dead, frontier boundaries will be dead, dogmas will be dead; man will live. He will possess something higher than all these-a great country, the whole earth, and a great hope, the whole heaven.
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I think, therefore I doubt.
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Yes, instruction! Light! Light! Everything comes from light, and to everything it returns.
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That is the explanation of war, an outrage by humanity upon humanity in despite of humanity.
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It seems as though, at the approach of a certain dark hour, the light of heaven infills those who are leaving the light of earth.
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If you are stone, be magnetic; if a plant, be sensitive; but if you are human be love.
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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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Beauty is as useful as the useful. More so, perhaps. (Le beau est aussi utile que l'utile. Plus peut-etre.)
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All roads are blocked to a philosophy which reduces everything to the word "no." To "no" there is only one answer and that is "yes." Nihilism has no substance. There is no such thing as nothingness, and zero does not exist. Everything is something. Nothing is nothing. Man lives more by affirmation than by bread.
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At the shrine of friendship never say die, let the wine of friendship never run dry.
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Music is the vapor of art. It is to poetry what reverie is to thought, what fluid is to solid, what the ocean of clouds is to the ocean of waves.
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God secludes Himself; but the thinker listens at the door.
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First problem. To produce wealth. Second problem. To distribute it.
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We are not loved by our friends for what we are; rather, we are loved in spite of what we are.
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I'd like a drink. I desire to forget life. Life is a hideous invention by somebody I don't know. It doesn't last, and it's good for nothing. You break your neck simply living.