Victor Hugo Quotes
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In my old age there is a coming into flower. My body wanes; my mind waxes.
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If you are leaving that sorrowful place with hate and anger against men, you are worthy of compassion; if you leave it with good will, gentleness and peace, you are better than any of us.
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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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My day's work will begin again the next morning. The tomb is not a blind alley.
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A thousand men enslaved fear one beast free.
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The soul helps the body, and at certain moments raises it. It is the only bird that sustains its cage.
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Emotion is always new.
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It is not enough to be happy, one must be content.
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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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No religion but blasphemes a little.
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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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The production of souls is the secret of unfathomable depth.
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Whom man kills, him God restoreth to life.
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The pupil dilates in darkness and in the end finds light, just as the soul dilates in misfortune and in the end finds God.
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Does not beauty confer a benefit upon us, even by the simple fact of being beautiful?
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The peasants of the Asturias believe that in every litter of wolves there is one pup that is killed by the mother for fear that on growing up it would devour the other little ones.
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A fall from such a height is rarely straight downwards.
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It is the essence of truth that it is never excessive.... We must not resort to the flame where only light is required.
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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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Caution is the eldest child of wisdom.
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To breathe Paris is to preserve one's soul.
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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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Every day has its great grief or its small anxiety. ... One cloud is dispelled, another forms. There is hardly one day in a hundred of real joy and bright sunshine.
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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.