Victor Hugo Quotes
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In the relations of man with the animals, with the flowers, with all the objects of creation, there is a whole great ethic, scarcely perceived as yet, which will at length break through into the light, and which will be the corollary and the complement to human ethics.
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Aimer, c'est agir
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One sometimes says: 'He killed himself because he was bored with life.' One ought rather to say: 'He killed himself because he was bored by lack of life.'
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Have courage for the great sorrows of life and patience for the small ones; and when you have laboriously accomplished your daily task, go to sleep in peace.
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One of the hardest tasks is to extract continually from one's soul an almost inexhaustible ill will.
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There are thoughts which are prayers. There are moments when, whatever the posture of the body, the soul is on its knees.
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Genius: the superhuman in man.
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There is a sacred horror about everything grand. It is easy to admire mediocrity and hills; but whatever is too lofty, a genius as well as a mountain, an assembly as well as a masterpiece, seen too near, is appalling.
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Do not forget, do not ever forget, that you have promised me to use the money to make yourself an honest man.' Valjean, who did not recall having made any promise, was silent. The bishop had spoken the words slowly and deliberately. He concluded with a solemn emphasis: Jean Valjean, my brother, you no longer belong to what is evil but to what is good. I have bought your soul to save it from black thoughts and the spirit of perdition, and I give it to God.
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Ce besoin de l’immatériel est le plus vivace de tous. Il faut du pain; mais avant le pain, il faut l’idéal.
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Nothing else in the world... not all the armies... is so powerful as an idea whose time has come.
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Diamonds are to be found only in the darkness of the earth, and truth in the darkness of the mind.
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When God desires to destroy a thing, he entrusts its destruction to the thing itself. Every bad institution of this world ends by suicide.
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The little people must be sacred to the big ones, and it is from the rights of the weak that the duty of the strong is comprised.
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Those who do not weep, do not see.
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I put a Phrygian cap on the old dictionary.
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I'm religiously opposed to religion.
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Rhyme, that enslaved queen, that supreme charm of our poetry, that creator of our meter.
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À quelle heure, s'il vous plaît?
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Common sense is in spite of, not as the result of education.
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I love all men who think, even those who think otherwise than myself.
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When a man is out of sight, it is not too long before he is out of mind.
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The human soul has still greater need of the ideal than of the real. It is by the real that we exist; it is by the ideal that we live.
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As we have explained, in first love the soul is taken long before the body; later the body is taken long before the soul; sometimes the soul is not taken at all.