Victor Hugo Quotes
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God secludes Himself; but the thinker listens at the door.
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Popularity - a piece of faded tinsel, that is out of date.
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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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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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The saints were his friends, and blessed him; the monsters were his friends, and guarded him.
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France lost a great novel last night.
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The hand which moves over the dial moves also among souls.
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Table talk and Lovers' talk equally elude the grasp; Lovers' talk is clouds, table talk is smoke.
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Vengeance comes from the individual and punishment from God.
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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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The real, native South Seas food is lousy. You can't eat it.
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Dieu s'est fait homme; soit. Le diable s'est fait femme!
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Ecclesiastes names thee Almighty, the Maccabees name thee Creator, the Epistle to the Ephesians names thee Liberty, Baruch names thee Immensity, the Psalms name thee Wisdom and Truth, John names thee Light, the Book of Kings names thee Lord, Exodus names thee Providence, Leviticus Sanctity, Esdras Justice, creation names thee God, man names thee Father; but Solomon names thee Compassion, which is the most beautiful of all thy names.
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Ma vie est une énigme dont ton nom est le mot. (My life is an enigma, of which your name is the word.)
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It has become necessary to call the attention of European governments to a fact which is apparently so insignificant that the governments seem not to notice it. The fact is this: an entire people is being annihilated. Where? In Europe. Are there witnesses? One witness, the entire world. Do the governments see it? No.
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I'd like a drink. I desire to forget life. Life is a hideous invention by somebody I don't know. It doesn't last, and it's good for nothing. You break your neck simply living.
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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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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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A wedding is not house-keeping.
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Promise to give me a kiss on my brow when I am dead. – I shall feel it." She dropped her head again on Marius' knees, and her eyelids closed. He thought the poor soul had departed. Eponine remained motionless. All at once, at the very moment when Marius fancied her asleep forever, she slowly opened her eyes in which appeared the sombre profundity of death, and said to him in a tone whose sweetness seemed already to proceed from another world: – "And by the way, Monsieur Marius, I believe that I was a little bit in love with you.
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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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There are things stronger than the strongest man.
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Success is a very hideous thing. Its false resemblance to merit deceives men.