Victor Hugo Quotes
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A doctor’s door should never be closed, a priest's door should always be open.
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God secludes Himself; but the thinker listens at the door.
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A shadow is hard to seize by the throat and dash to the ground.
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There is in every village a torch - the teacher; and an extinguisher - the priest.
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Progress is the stride of God.
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War can only be qualified by its object, and there is neither foreign war nor civil war, there is only just or unjust war.
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Dreaming is happiness. Waiting is life.
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Men hate those to whom they have to lie.
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Let us fear the worst, but work with faith; the best will always take care of itself.
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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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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 earth is a great piece of stupidity.
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He was at his own request and through his own complicity driven out of all his happinesses one after the other; and he had this sorrow, that after having lost Cosette wholly in one day, he was afterwards obliged to lose her again in detail.
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I have examined the death penalty under each of its two aspects: as a direct action, and as an indirect one. What does it come down to? Nothing but something horrible and useless, nothing but a way of shedding blood that is called a crime when an individual commits it, but is sadly called "justice" when society brings it about. Make no mistake, you lawmakers and judges, in the eyes of God as in those of conscience, what is a crime when individuals do it is no less an offense when society commits the deed.
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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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Those who always pray are necessary to those who never pray.
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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 is a spectacle more grand than the sea; it is heaven; there is a spectacle more grand than heaven; it is the conscience.
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A translation in verse . . . seems to me something absurd, impossible.
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Success is a very hideous thing. Its false resemblance to merit deceives men.
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God has set his intentions in the flowers, in the dawn, in the spring, it is his will that we should love.
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But alas, if I have not maintained my victory, it is God's fault for not making man and the devil of equal strength.
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Phenomena intersect; to see but one is to see nothing.
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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.