Victor Hugo Quotes
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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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I dislike wealth and prosperity, especially that of other men.
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Joy is the reflex of terror.
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Work, which makes a man free, and thought, which makes him worthy of freedom.
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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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Poetry contains philosophy as the soul contains reason.
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Popularity - a piece of faded tinsel, that is out of date.
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There are moments when a rope's end, a pole, the branch of the tree, is life itself, and it is a frightful thing to see a living being lose his hold upon it, and fall like a ripe fruit.
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There is will in the thought, there is none in the dream. The dream, which is completely spontaneous, takes and keeps, even in the gigantic and the ideal, the form of our mind. Nothing springs more directly and more sincerely from the very bottom of our souls than our unreflected and indefinite aspirations towards the splendours of destiny.
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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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The quantity of civilization is measured by the quality of imagination.
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God became man, granted. The devil became a woman.
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Friend is sometimes a word devoid of meaning; enemy, never.
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In the vast cosmical changes, the universal life comes and goes in unknown quantities, ... sowing an animalcule here, crumbling a star there, oscillating and ... entangling, from the highest to the lowest, all activities in the obscurity of a dizzying mechanism, hanging the flight of an insect upon the movement of the earth... Enormous gearing, whose first motor is the gnat, and whose last wheel is the zodiac.
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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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Wisdom is the health of the soul.
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The wind of revolutions is not tractable.
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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.
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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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It is the peculiarity of grief to bring out the childish side of man.
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Gutenberg's invention of printing is the greatest event-the mother of revolution.
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There is but one way of refusing To-morrow, that is to die.
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Mothers arms are made of tenderness, And sweet sleep blesses the child who lies therein.