Victor Hugo Quotes
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To think is of itself to be useful; it is always and in all cases a striving toward God.
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Scepticism, that dry caries of the intelligence.
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What Shakespeare was able to do in English he would certainly not have done in French.
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Toleration is the best religion.
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He who opens a school door, closes a prison.
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Reaction - a boat which is going against the current but which does not prevent the river from flowing on.
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Nothing can be more depressing than to expose, naked to the light of thought, the hideous growth of argot. Indeed it is like a sort of repellent animal intended to dwell in darkness which has been dragged out of its cloaca. One seems to see a horned and living creature viciously struggling to be restored to the place where it belongs. One word is like a claw, another like a sightless and bleeding eye; and there are phrases which clutch like the pincers of a crab. And all of it is alive with the hideous vitality of things that have organized themselves amid disorganization.
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Indigestion is charged by God with enforcing morality on the stomach.
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Whatever causes night in our souls may leave stars.
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The world is the expanding Greece and Greece is the shrinking world.
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Mankind is not a circle with a single center but an ellipse with two focal points of which facts are one and ideas the other.
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Verse in itself does not constitute poetry. Verse is only an elegant vestment for a beautiful form. Poetry can express itself in prose, but it does so more perfectly under the grace and majesty of verse. It is poetry of soul that inspires noble sentiments and noble actions as well as noble writings.
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He, who every morning plans the transactions of the day, and follows that plan, carries a thread that will guide him through a labyrinth of the most busy life.
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All the forces in the world are not so powerful as an idea whose time has come.
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When dictatorship is a fact, revolution becomes a right.
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Men become accustomed to poison by degrees.
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The most powerful symptom of love is a tenderness which becomes at times almost insupportable.
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Short as life is, we make it still shorter by the careless waste of time.
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Good actions are the invisible hinges on the doors of heaven.
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One believes others will do what he will do to himself.
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There are no rules, no models; rather, there are no rules other than the general laws of Nature.
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My childhood began, as everybody's childhood begins, with prejudices. Man finds prejudices beside his cradle, puts them from him a little in the course of his career, and often, alas! takes to them again in his old age.
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Thought is more than a right - it is the very breath of man. Whoever fetters thought attacks man himself. To speak, to write, to publish, are things, so far as the right is concerned, absolutely identical. They are the ever-enlarging circles of intelligence in action; they are the sonorous waves of thought.
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Despotism is a long crime.