Victor Hugo Quotes
-
We are all under sentence of death, but with a sort of indefinite reprieve.
-
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.
-
To put everything in balance is good, to put everything in harmony is better.
-
Let us admit, without bitterness, that the individual has his distinct interests and can, without felony, stipulate for those interests and defend them. The present has its pardonable amount of egotism; momentary life has its claims, and cannot be expected to sacrifice itself incessantly to the future. The generation which is in its turn passing over the earth is not forced to abridge its life for the sake of the generations, its equals after all, whose turn shall come later on.
-
The spirit of God, like the sun, always gives all its light at once. The spirit of man resembles the pale moon, which has its phases, its absences and its returns, its lucidity and its spots, its fullness and its disappearance, which borrows all its light from the rays of the sun, and which still dares to intercept them on occasion.
-
Dreaming is happiness. Waiting is life.
-
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.
-
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.
-
Progress is not accomplished in one stage.
-
Emotion is always new.
-
"Dost thou understand? I love thee!" he cried again."What love!" said the unhappy girl with a shudder.He resumed, – "The love of a damned soul.
-
On this point, the priest and the philosopher agree: We must die.
-
If you look in the eyes of the young, you see flame. If you look in the eyes of the old, you see light.
-
Whether we be Italians or Frenchmen, misery concerns us all. Ever since history has been written, ever since philosophy has meditated, misery has been the garment of the human race; the moment has at length arrived for tearing off that rag, and for replacing, upon the naked limbs of the Man-People, the sinister fragment of the past with the grand purple robe of the dawn.
-
To lie a little is not possible: he who lies, lies the whole lie.
-
Upon the first goblet he read this inscription, monkey wine; upon the second, lion wine; upon the third, sheep wine; upon the fourth, swine wine. These four inscriptions expressed the four descending degrees of drunkenness: the first, that which enlivens; the second, that which irritates; the third, that which stupefies; finally the last, that which brutalizes.
-
Logic ignores the almost, just as the sun ignores the candle.
-
And, moreover, when it happens that both are sincere and good, nothing will mix and amalgamate more easily than an old priest and an old soldier. In reality, they are the same kind of man. One has devoted himself to country upon earth, the other to his country in heaven; there is no other difference.
-
Those who pray always are necessary to those who never pray. In our view, the whole question is in the amount of thought that is mingled with prayer.
-
It is not enough to be happy, one must be content.
-
Philosophy is the microscope of thought. Everything desires to flee from it, but nothing escapes it.
-
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.
-
The poetic element lying hidden in most women is the source of their magnetic attraction.
-
I would rather be the head of a fly than the tail of a lion.