Victor Hugo Quotes
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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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A bit of mould is a pleiad of flowers; a nebula is an ant-hill of stars.
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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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The hand which moves over the dial moves also among souls.
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Since we shall love each other, I shall be great and you shall be rich.
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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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Inspiration and genius -one and the same.
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A translation in verse . . . seems to me something absurd, impossible.
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Press on! A better fate awaits thee.
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In my old age there is a coming into flower. My body wanes; my mind waxes.
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The earth is a great piece of stupidity.
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Love resembles a tree: it bends under its own weight, deeply rooted in our being and sometimes turns green in the ruins of a heart.
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There is in every village a torch - the teacher; and an extinguisher - the priest.
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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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What is fright by night is curiosity by day.
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Often the losing of a battle leads to the winning of progress. Less glory but greater liberty: the drum is silent and the voices of reason can be heard.
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And if it happened to be a Christmas-night when the great bell seemed to rattle in its throat as it called the faithful to the midnight mass, there was such an indescribable air of life spread over the sombre facade that the great door-way looked as if it were swallowing the entire crowd, and the rose-window staring at them.
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People weighed down with troubles do not look back; they know only too well that misfortune stalks them.
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A doctor’s door should never be closed, a priest's door should always be open.
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A fixed idea ends in madness or heroism.
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Phenomena intersect; to see but one is to see nothing.
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In this way, his unhappy soul struggled with its anguish. Eighteen hundred years before this unfortunate man, the mysterious Being, in whom all the sanctities and all the sufferings of humanity come together, He too, while the olive trees trembled in the fierce breath of the Infinite, had brushed away the fearful cup that appeared before him, streaming with shadow and running over with darkness, in the star-filled depths.
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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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God secludes Himself; but the thinker listens at the door.