Victor Hugo Quotes
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Melancholy is the happiness of being sad.
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Que l'avenir soit un orient au lieu d'être un couchant, c'est la consolation de l'homme.
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Gutenberg's invention of printing is the greatest event-the mother of revolution.
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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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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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He was at his own request and through his own complicity driven out of all his happinesses one after the other; and he had this sorrow, that after having lost Cosette wholly in one day, he was afterwards obliged to lose her again in detail.
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Popularity - a piece of faded tinsel, that is out of date.
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You ask me what forces me to speak? a strange thing; my conscience.
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There is no distress so complete but that even in the most critical moments the inexplicable sunrise of hope is seen in its depths.
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Popularity? It's glory's small change.
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The peculiarity of sunrise is to make us laugh at all our terrors of the night, and our laugh is always proportioned to the fear we have had.
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Oh Lord! Open the doors of night for me So that I may leave this place and disappear.
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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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Not seeing people allows you to think of them as perfect in all kinds of ways.
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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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Vengeance comes from the individual and punishment from God.
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If I speak, I am condemned. If I stay silent, I am damned!
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Dieu s'est fait homme; soit. Le diable s'est fait femme!
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So long as ignorance and poverty exist on earth, books of the nature of Les Miserables cannot fail to be of use.
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When I speak to you about myself, I am speaking to you about yourself. How is it you don't see that?
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Marius and Cosette did not ask where this would lead them. They looked at themselves as arrived. It is a strange pretension for men to ask that love should lead them somewhere.
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As for methods of prayer, all of them are good as long as they are sincere.
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I dislike wealth and prosperity, especially that of other men.
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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.