Victor Hugo Quotes
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To think of shadows is a serious thing.
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Religions do a useful thing: they narrow God to the limits of man. Philosophy replies by doing a necessary thing: it elevates man to the plane of God.
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The brutalities of progress are called revolutions. When they are over we realize this: that the human race has been roughly handled, but that it has advanced.
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Curiosity is one of the forms of feminine bravery.
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I will be Chateaubriand or nothing.
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How did it happen that their lips came together? How does it happen that birds sing, that snow melts, that the rose unfolds, that the dawn whitens behind the stark shapes of trees on the quivering summit of the hill? A kiss, and all was said.
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Virtue has a veil, vice a mask.
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Architecture has recorded the great ideas of the human race. Not only every religious symbol, but every human thought has its page in that vast book.
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To contemplate is to look at shadows.
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Intelligence is the wife, imagination is the mistress, memory is the servant.
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Pain is as diverse as man. One suffers as one can.
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Puns are the droppings of soaring wits.
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Nature has made a pebble and a female. The lapidary makes the diamond, and the lover makes the woman.
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Smallness in a great man seems smaller by its disproportion with all the rest.
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Style is the substance of the subject called unceasingly to the surface.
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God has bestowed two gifts on man: hope and ignorance. Ignorance is the better of the two.
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In the French language, there is a great gulf between prose and poetry; in English, there is hardly any difference. It is a splendid privilege of the great literary languages Greek, Latin, and French that they possess a prose. English has not this privilege. There is no prose in English.
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An intelligent hell would be better than a stupid paradise.
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There is one spectacle grander than the sea, that is the sky; there is one spectacle grander than the sky, that is the interior of the soul.
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What is history? An echo of the past in the future; a reflex from the future on the past.
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The beautiful has but one type, the ugly has a thousand.
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Dear God! how beauty varies in nature and art. In a woman the flesh must be like marble; in a statue the marble must be like flesh.
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Nations, like stars, are entitled to eclipse. All is well, provided the light returns and the eclipse does not become endless night. Dawn and resurrection are synonymous. The reappearance of the light is the same as the survival of the soul.
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One believes others will do what he will do to himself.