Victor Hugo Quotes
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We shall look on crime as a disease, and its physicians shall displace the judges, its hospitals displace the Galleys. Liberty and health shall be alike. We shall pour balm and oil where we formerly applied iron and fire; evil will be treated in charity, instead of in anger. This change will be simple and sublime.
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Everything Changes. The only thing that remains immovable across the centuries and fixes the character of a people is cooking.
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A doctor’s door should never be closed, a priest's door should always be open.
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Logic ignores the almost, just as the sun ignores the candle.
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For true poetry, complete poetry, consists in the harmony of contraries. Hence, it is time to say aloud--and it is here above allthat exceptions prove the rule--that everything that exists in nature exists in art.
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The future has many names: For the weak, it means the unattainable. For the fearful, it means the unknown. For the courageous, it means opportunity.
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Wisdom and eloquence are not always united.
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Great buildings, like great mountains, are the work of centuries.
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Not seeing people permits us to imagine them with every perfection.
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A benevolent malefactor, merciful, gentle, helpful, clement, a convict, returning good for evil, giving back pardon for hatred, preferring pity to vengeance, preferring to ruin himself rather than to ruin his enemy, saving him who had smitten him, kneeling on the heights of virtue, more nearly akin to an angel than to a man. Javert was constrained to admit to himself that this monster existed. Things could not go on in this manner.
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It is sad to tell, but after having tried society, which had caused his misfortune, he tried Providence which created society, and condemned it also.
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History has its truth, and so has legend. Legendary truth is of another nature than historical truth. Legendary truth is invention whose result is reality. Furthermore, history and legend have the same goal; to depict eternal man beneath momentary man.
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His judgement demonstrates that one can be a genius and understand nothing of an art that is not one's own.
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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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I was always a lover of soft-winged things.
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Ideas can no more flow backward than can a river.
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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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The rich's paradise was created by the poor's hell.
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When the heart is dry the eye is dry.
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Because a fact seems strange to you, you conclude that it is not one. ... All science, however, commences by being strange. Science is successive. It goes from one wonder to another. It mounts by a ladder. The science of to-day would seem extravagant to the science of a former time. Ptolemy would believe Newton mad.
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Labor is life; thought is light.
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At least you are mine! Soon – in a few months, perhaps, my angel will sleep in my arms, will awaken in my arms, will live there. All your thought at all moments, all your looks will be for me; all my thought, all my moments, all my looks will be for you!
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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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If you look in the eyes of the young, you see flame. If you look in the eyes of the old, you see light.