Victor Hugo Quotes
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Sleep comes more easily than it returns.
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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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A shadow is hard to seize by the throat and dash to the ground.
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On this point, the priest and the philosopher agree: We must die.
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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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Vengeance comes from the individual and punishment from God.
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The book which the reader now holds in his hands, from one end to the other, as a whole and in its details, whatever gaps, exceptions, or weaknesses it may contain, treats of the advance from evil to good, from injustice to justice, from falsity to truth, from darkness to daylight, from blind appetite to conscience, from decay to life, from bestiality to duty, from Hell to Heaven, from limbo to God. Matter itself is the starting-point, and the point of arrival is the soul. Hydra at the beginning, an angel at the end.
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There is in every village a torch - the teacher; and an extinguisher - the priest.
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There is a secret drawer in every woman's heart.
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Philosophy is the microscope of thought. Everything desires to flee from it, but nothing escapes it.
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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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Where would the shout of love begin, if not from the summit of sacrifice?
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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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There is a material advancement; we desire it. There is, also, a moral grandeur; we hold fast to it.
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Lastly, this threefold poetry flows from three great sources - The Bible, Homer, Shakespeare.... The Bible before the Iliad, the Iliad before Shakespeare.
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There is a way of meeting error while on the road of truth.
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That is to be two and to be but one. A man and a woman mingled into one angel. It is heaven.
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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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To live a life which is a perpetual falsehood is to suffer unknown tortures.
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In every cradle decked with rosy wreath Lurk germs of death.
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Loving is half of believing.
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...The girls chirped and chatted like uncaged warblers. They were delirious with joy... Intoxications of life’s morning! Enchanted years! The wing of a dragonfly trembles! Oh, reader, whoever you may be, do you have such memories? Have you walked in the underbrush, pushing aside branches for the charming head behind you? Have you slid laughing, down some slope wet with rain, with the woman you loved?
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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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In the Twentieth Century war will be dead, the scaffold will be dead, hatred will be dead, frontier boundaries will be dead, dogmas will be dead; man will live. He will possess something higher than all these-a great country, the whole earth, and a great hope, the whole heaven.