Victor Hugo Quotes
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Are you afraid of the good you might do?
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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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Thus, during those nineteen years of torture and slavery, did this soul rise and fall at the same time. Light entered on the one side, and darkness on the other.
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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 fall from such a height is rarely straight downwards.
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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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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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There are plenty who regard a wall behind which something is happening as a very curious thing.
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One can no more keep the mind from returning to an idea than the sea from returning to a shore. For a sailor, this is called the tide; in the case of the guilty it is called remorse. God stirs up the soul as well as the ocean.
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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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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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Men are still men. The despot's wickedness Comes of ill teaching, and of power's excess,-- Comes of the purple he from childhood wears, Slaves would be tyrants if the chance were theirs.
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If she gives me all her time it is because I have all her heart.
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O darkness, the sky is a gloomy precinct Whose door you close, and whose key the soul owns; And night divides itself in half, being diabolical and holy, Between Ilis, the black angel, and Christ, the starry Human Being.
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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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Woman, nude, is the blue sky. Clouds and garments are an obstacle to contemplation. Beauty and infinity would be gazed upon unveiled.
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A republic may be called the climate of civilization.
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The soul in the darkness sins, but the real sinner is he who caused the darkness.
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God has made the cat to give man the pleasure of caressing the tiger.
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The sadness which reigned everywhere was but an excuse for unfailing kindness.
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He sought...to transform the grief which looks down into the grave by showing it the grief which looks up to the stars.
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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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We should judge a man much more surely from what he dreams than from what he thinks.
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To rescue from oblivion even a fragment of a language which men have used and which is in danger of being lost -that is to say, one of the elements, whether good or bad, which have shaped and complicated civilization -is to extend the scope of social observation and to serve civilization.