Victor Hugo Quotes
-
Love partakes of the soul itself. it is of the same nature. like it, it is a divine spark, like it, it is incorruptible, indivisible, imperishable, it is the point of fire which is within us, which is immortal and infinite, which nothing can limit and nothing can extinguish.
-
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.
-
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.
-
You ask me what forces me to speak? a strange thing; my conscience.
-
I'm not in the world to guard my own life, but to guard souls.
-
Genuflection before the idol or the dollar destroys the muscles which walk and the will that moves.
-
There is a spectacle more grand than the sea; it is heaven; there is a spectacle more grand than heaven; it is the conscience.
-
Diamonds are found only in the dark bowels of the earth; truths are found only in the depths of thought. It seemed to him that after descending into those depths after long groping in the blackest of this darkness, he had at last found one of these diamonds, one of these truths, and that he held it in his hand; and it blinded him to look at it.
-
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.
-
What's our baggage? Only vows, Happiness, and all our care, And the flower that sweetly shows Nestling lightly in your hair.
-
There is a material advancement; we desire it. There is, also, a moral grandeur; we hold fast to it.
-
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.
-
It is God who makes woman beautiful, it is the devil who makes her pretty.
-
To be a saint is the exception; to be a just person is the rule. Err, stumble, commit sin, but be one of the just.
-
A saint addicted to excessive self-abnegation is a dangerous associate; he may infect you with poverty, and a stiffening of those joints which are needed for advancement-in a word, with more renunciation than you care for-and so you flee the contagion.
-
I believe in religion against the religious; in the pitifulness of orisons, and in the sublimity of prayer.
-
To err is human. To loaf is Parisian.
-
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.
-
...Human thought has no limit. At its risk and peril, it analyzes and dissects its own fascination. We could almost say that, by a sort of splendid reaction, it fascinates nature; the mysterious world surrounding us returns what it receives; it is likely that contemplators are contemplated.
-
But alas, if I have not maintained my victory, it is God's fault for not making man and the devil of equal strength.
-
The most beautiful of altars, he said, is the soul of an unhappy creature consoled and thankfing God.
-
The hand which moves over the dial moves also among souls.
-
God was bored by him.
-
Nature, like a kind and smiling mother, lends herself to our dreams and cherishes our fancies.