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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.
Victor Hugo -
He who opens a school door, closes a prison.
Victor Hugo
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Indigestion is charged by God with enforcing morality on the stomach.
Victor Hugo -
The world is the expanding Greece and Greece is the shrinking world.
Victor Hugo -
What Shakespeare was able to do in English he would certainly not have done in French.
Victor Hugo -
Good actions are the invisible hinges on the doors of heaven.
Victor Hugo -
To think is of itself to be useful; it is always and in all cases a striving toward God.
Victor Hugo -
All the forces in the world are not so powerful as an idea whose time has come.
Victor Hugo
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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.
Victor Hugo -
In the opera we call love, the libretto is almost nothing.
Victor Hugo -
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.
Victor Hugo -
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.
Victor Hugo -
There is one thing stronger than all the armies in the world, and that is an idea whose time as come.
Victor Hugo -
When dictatorship is a fact, revolution becomes a right.
Victor Hugo
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Despotism is a long crime.
Victor Hugo -
Short as life is, we make it still shorter by the careless waste of time.
Victor Hugo -
One believes others will do what he will do to himself.
Victor Hugo -
Reaction - a boat which is going against the current but which does not prevent the river from flowing on.
Victor Hugo -
The omnipotence of evil has never resulted in anything but fruitless efforts. Our thoughts always escape from whoever tries to smother them.
Victor Hugo -
To think of shadows is a serious thing.
Victor Hugo
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In this world, which is so plainly the antechamber of another, there are no happy men. The true division of humanity is between those who live in light and those who live in darkness. Our aim must be to diminish the number of the latter and increase the number of the former. That is why we demand education and knowledge.
Victor Hugo -
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.
Victor Hugo -
I am an intelligent river which has reflected successively all the banks before which it has flowed by meditating only on the images offered by those changing shores.
Victor Hugo -
Men become accustomed to poison by degrees.
Victor Hugo