Victor Hugo Quotes
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A strange thing has happened, do you know? I am in darkness. There is a person who, departing, took away the sun.
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Love is a fault; so be it.
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There is a secret drawer in every woman's heart.
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It is man's consolation that the future is to be a sunrise instead of a sunset.
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Every step which the intelligence of Europe has taken has been in spite of the clerical party.
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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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Philosophy is the microscope of thought. Everything desires to flee from it, but nothing escapes it.
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God manifests himself to us in the first degree through the life of the universe, and in the second degree through the thought of man. The second manifestation is not less holy than the first. The first is named Nature, the second is named Art.
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Heaven, on occasion, half opens its arms to us; and that is the great moment.
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Art moves. Hence its civilizing power.
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We teachers make the road, others will make the journey.
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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.
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Winter is on my head, but eternal spring is in my heart.
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The merciful precepts of Christ will at last suffuse the Code and it will glow with their radiance. Crime will be considered an illness with its own doctors to replace your judges and its hospitals to replace your prisons. Liberty shall be equated with health. Ointments and oil shall be applied to limbs that were once shackled and branded. Infirmities that once were scourged with anger shall now be bathed with love. The cross in place of the gallows: sublime and yet so simple.
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All that was neither a city, nor a church, nor a river, nor color, nor light, nor shadow: it was reverie. For a long time, I remained motionless, letting myself be penetrated gently by this unspeakable ensemble, by the serenity of the sky and the melancholy of the moment. I do not know what was going on in my mind, and I could not express it; it was one of those ineffable moments when one feels something in himself which is going to sleep and something which is awakening.
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Wisdom and eloquence are not always united.
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The delight we inspire in others has this enchanting peculiarity that, far from being diminished like every other reflection, it returns to us more radiant than ever.
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Ideas can no more flow backward than can a river.
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I was dying when you came.
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No religion but blasphemes a little.
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The Parisian is to the French what the Athenian was to the Greeks: no one sleeps better than he, no one is more openly frivolous and idle, no one appears more heedless. But this is misleading. He is given to every kind of listlessness, but when there is glory to be won he may be inspired with every kind of fury. Give him a pike and he will enact the tenth of August, a musket and you have Austerlitz. He was the springboard of Napoleon and the mainstay of Danton. At the cry of "la patrie" he enrols, and at the call of liberty he tears up the pavements. Beware of him!
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Whom man kills, him God restoreth to life.
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She had had sweet dreams, which possibly arose from the fact that her little bed was very white.
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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.