Victor Hugo Quotes
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Nature is pitiless; she never withdraws her flowers, her music, her fragrance, and her sunlight from before human cruelty or suffering.
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Dieu s'est fait homme; soit. Le diable s'est fait femme!
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Reason is intelligence taking exercise. Imagination is intelligence with an erection.
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There is a material advancement; we desire it. There is, also, a moral grandeur; we hold fast to it.
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Emotion is always new and the word has always served; therein lies the difficulty of expressing emotion.
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Since we shall love each other, I shall be great and you shall be rich.
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I have been loving you a little more every minute since this morning.
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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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There is a way of meeting error while on the road of truth.
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To die for lack of love is horrible. The asphyxia of the soul.
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The most beautiful of altars, he said, is the soul of an unhappy creature consoled and thankfing God.
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The saints were his friends, and blessed him; the monsters were his friends, and guarded him.
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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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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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With a tiny bit of effort, the nettle would be useful; if you neglect it, it becomes a pest. So then we kill it. How many men are like nettles My friends, there is no such thing as a weed and no such thing as a bad man. There are only bad cultivators.
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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.
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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 real, native South Seas food is lousy. You can't eat it.
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Not seeing people allows you to think of them as perfect in all kinds of ways.
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Vengeance comes from the individual and punishment from God.
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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 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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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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Do you hear the people sing Lost in the valley of the night? It is the music of a people Who are climbing to the light. For the wretched of the earth There is a flame that never dies. Even the darkest night will end And the sun will rise.