Victor Hugo Quotes
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A queen, devoid of beauty is not queen; She needs the royalty of beauty's mien.
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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.
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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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Caution is the eldest child of wisdom.
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A thousand men enslaved fear one beast free.
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Does not beauty confer a benefit upon us, even by the simple fact of being beautiful?
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Emotion is always new.
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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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Whom man kills, him God restoreth to life.
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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.
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Logic ignores the almost, just as the sun ignores the candle.
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Great buildings, like great mountains, are the work of centuries.
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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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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.
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Winter is on my head, but eternal spring is in my heart.
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Kings are for nations in their swaddling-clothes: France has attained her majority.
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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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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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God is behind everything, but everything hides God.
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The world of sleep has an existence of its own.