Victor Hugo Quotes
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Philosophy is the microscope of thought. Everything desires to flee from it, but nothing escapes it.
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Die, very good, but do not make others die. Suicides like the one which is about to take place here are sublime, but suicide is restricted, and does not allow of extension; and so soon as it affects your neighbors, suicide becomes murder.
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A library implies an act of faith which generations, still in darkness hid, sign in their night in witness of the dawn.
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I advance in life, I grow more simple, and I become more and more patriotic for humanity.
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Nothing is more dangerous than to stop working. It is a habit that can soon be lost, one that is easily neglected and hard to resume. A measure of day-dreaming is a good thing, like a drug prudently used ... But too much submerges and drowns. Woe to the intellectual worker who allows himself to lapse wholly from positive thinking into day-dreaming. He thinks he can easily change back, and tells himself that it is all one. He is wrong! To substitute day-dreaming for thought is to confuse poison with a source of nourishment.
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There are things stronger than the strongest man.
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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 cruel of heart have their own black happiness.
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Seeing so much poverty everywhere makes me think that God is not rich. He gives the appearance of it, but I suspect some financial difficulties.
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Ah! There you are! he exclaimed, looking at Jean Valjean. I'm so glad to see you. Well, but how is this? I gave you the candlesticks too, which are of silver like the rest, and for which you can certainly get two hundred francs. Why did you not carry them away with your forks and spoons?
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I had a dream my life would be different from this hell I am living, so different from what it seemed. Now life has killed the dream I dreamed.
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Humanity is our common lot. All men are made of the same clay. There is no difference, at least here on Earth, in the fate assigned to us. We come of the same void, inhabit the same flesh, are dissolved in the same ashes. But ignorance infecting the human substance turns it black, and that incurable blackness, gaining possession of the soul, becomes Evil.
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To put everything in balance is good, to put everything in harmony is better.
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Progress is not accomplished in one stage.
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Love is a fault; so be it.
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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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We say and exclaim within ourselves without breaking silence, in a tumult where everything speaks except our mouths. The realities of the soul are none the less real for being invisible and impalpable.
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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 saints were his friends, and blessed him; the monsters were his friends, and guarded him.
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And the dream that our mind had sketched in haste Shall others continue, but never complete. For none upon earth can achieve his scheme; The best as the worst are futile here: We wake at the self-same point of the dream, All is here begun, and finished elsewhere.
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To lie a little is not possible: he who lies, lies the whole lie.
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Logic ignores the almost, just as the sun ignores the candle.
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A queen, devoid of beauty is not queen; She needs the royalty of beauty's mien.
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I refuse the oration of all churches. I ask a prayer of all souls. I believe in God.