Victor Hugo Quotes
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The jostling of young minds against each other has this wonderful attribute, that one can never foresee the spark, nor predict the flash. What will spring up in a moment? Nobody knows.
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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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The most excellent symbol of the people is the paving stone. One walks on it until it falls on one's head.
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Nobody knows like a woman how to say things at the same time sweet and profound. Sweetness and depth, this is all of woman; this is all of Heaven.
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Melancholy is the happiness of being sad.
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The saints were his friends, and blessed him; the monsters were his friends, and guarded him.
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Do not ask the name of the person who seeks a bed for the night. He who is reluctant to give his name is the one who most needs shelter.
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Many great actions are committed in small struggles.
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The paradise of the rich is made out of the hell of the poor.
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History has its truth; and so has legend hers.
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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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What is the cat?" he exclaimed. "It is a corrective. God, having made the mouse, said, 'I've made a blunder.' And he made the cat. The cat is the erratum of the mouse. The mouse, plus the cat, Is the revised and corrected proof of creation.
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...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.
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Knowledge is a weight added to conscience.
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The first proof of charity in a priest, and especially a bishop, is poverty.
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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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If you are stone, be magnetic; if a plant, be sensitive; but if you are human be love.
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A day will come when all nations on our continent will form a European brotherhood... A day will come when we shall see... the United States of America and the United States of Europe face to face, reaching out for each other across the seas.
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This conflict between right and fact has endured since the origins of society. To bring the duel to an end, to consolidate the pure ideal with the human reality, to make the right peacefully interpenetrate the fact, and the fact the right, this is the work of the wise.
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The beginning as well as the end of all his thoughts was hatred of human law, that hatred which, if it be not checked in its growth by some providential event, becomes, in a certain time, hatred of society, then hatred of the human race, and then hatred of creation, and reveals itself by a vague and incessant desire to injure some living being, it matters not who.
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God whose gifts in gracious flood Unto all who seek are sent, Only asks you to be good And is content.
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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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Have but luck, and you will have the rest; be fortunate, and you will be thought great.
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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.