Victor Hugo Quotes
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A wretched woman is more unfortunate than a wretched man.
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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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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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To err is human. To loaf is Parisian.
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Science is continually correcting what it has said. Fertile corrections... science is a ladder... poetry is a winged flight... An artistic masterpiece exists for all time... Dante does not efface Homer.
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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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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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If a man has his throat cut in Paris, it's a murder. If 50,000 people are murdered in the east, it is a question.
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Joy is the reflex of terror.
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Let us say it now: to be blind and to be loved, is indeed, upon this earth where nothing is complete, one of the most strangely exquisite forms of happiness.
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Reason is intelligence taking exercise. Imagination is intelligence with an erection.
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It is those books which a man possesses but does not read which constitute the most suspicious evidence against him.
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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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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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The realities of life do not allow themselves to be forgotten.
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You ask me what forces me to speak? a strange thing; my conscience.
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Revery, which is thought in its nebulous state, borders closely upon the land of sleep, by which it is bounded as by a natural frontier.
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Many great actions are committed in small struggles.
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Gutenberg's invention of printing is the greatest event-the mother of revolution.
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The first proof of charity in a priest, and especially a bishop, is poverty.
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It is the peculiarity of grief to bring out the childish side of man.
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One only needs to see a smile in a white crape bonnet in order to enter the palace of dreams.
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People generally will soon understand that writers should be judged, not according to rules and species, which are contrary to nature and art, but according to the immutable principles of the art of composition, and the special laws of their individual temperaments.
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The most excellent symbol of the people is the paving stone. One walks on it until it falls on one's head.