Victor Hugo Quotes
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Philosophy should be an energy; it should find its aim and its effect in the amelioration of mankind.
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There are plenty who regard a wall behind which something is happening as a very curious thing.
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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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Whom man kills, him God restoreth to life.
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We are all under sentence of death, but with a sort of indefinite reprieve.
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The poetic element lying hidden in most women is the source of their magnetic attraction.
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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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A fall from such a height is rarely straight downwards.
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Kings are for nations in their swaddling-clothes: France has attained her majority.
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It is not so easy to keep silent when the silence is a lie.
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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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We are on the side of religion as opposed to religions, and we are among those who believe in the wretched inadequacy of sermons and the sublimity of prayer.
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Let the one fight for his flag, and the other for his ideal, and let them both imagine that they are fighting for the country; the strife will be colossal.
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Proverty and wealth are comparative sins.
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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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As we have said, robust souls are sometimes almost, but not entirely, overthrown by strokes of misfortune....Despair has steps leading upward. From total depression we rise to despondency, from despondency to affliction, from affliction to melancholy. Melancholy is a twilight state in which suffering transmutes into a somber joy....Melancholy is the enjoyment of being sad.
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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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Happiness wishes everybody happy.
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All the human and animal manure which the world wastes, if returned to the land, instead of being thrown into the sea, would suffice to nourish the world.
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Press on! A better fate awaits thee.
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The need of the immaterial is the most deeply rooted of all needs. One must have bread; but before bread, one must have the ideal.
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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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M. Myriel had to undergo the fate of every newcomer in a little town, where there are many mouths which talk, and very few heads which think.
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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.