Victor Hugo Quotes
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Work, which makes a man free, and thought, which makes him worthy of freedom.
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Solitude either develops the mental power, or renders men dull and vicious.
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Her soul trembled on her lips like a drop of dew on a flower.
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France lost a great novel last night.
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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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Every bird which flies has the thread of the infinite in its claw. Germination includes the hatching of a meteor and the tap of a swallow's bill breaking the egg, and it leads forward the birth of an earth-worm and the advent of Socrates.
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Dirt has been shrewdly termed "misplaced material.
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To be wicked does not insure prosperity - for the inn did not succeed well.
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They adored each other; but still the permanent and the immutable subsist. We may love and laugh, pout, clasp hands, smile, and exchange endearments, but that does not affect eternity. Two lovers hide in the dusk of evening, amid flowers and the twittering of birds, and enchant each other with their hearts shinning in their eyes; but the stars in their course still circle through infinite space.
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Revolutions spring not from accident, but from necessity. A revolution is a return from the factitious to the real. It takes place because it must.
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Have but luck, and you will have the rest; be fortunate, and you will be thought great.
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[T]he small is great, the great is small; all is in equilibrium in necessity.
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There are, as we know, powerful and illustrious atheists. At bottom, led back to the truth by their very force, they are not absolutely sure that they are atheists; it is with them only a question of definition, and in any case, if they do not believe in God, being great minds, they prove God.
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Human intelligence discovered a way of perpetuating itself, one not only more durable and more resistant than architecture, but also simpler and easier. Architecture was dethroned. The stone letters of Orpheus gave way to the lead letters of Gutenburg. The book will kill the edifice.
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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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What's our baggage? Only vows, Happiness, and all our care, And the flower that sweetly shows Nestling lightly in your hair.
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What makes night within us may leave stars.
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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.
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He had, they said, tasted in succession all the apples of the tree of knowledge, and, whether from hunger or disgust, had ended by tasting the forbidden fruit.
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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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Woe, alas, to those who have loved only bodies, forms, appearances! Death will rob them of everything. Try to love souls, you will find them again.
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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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Genuflection before the idol or the dollar destroys the muscles which walk and the will that moves.
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These are dark radiances. They have no suspicion that they are to be pitied. Certainly they are so. He who does not weep does not see. They are to be admired and pitied, as one would both pity and admire a being at once night and day, without eyes beneath his lashes but with a star on his brow.