Victor Hugo Quotes
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I put a Phrygian cap on the old dictionary.
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As the purse is emptied, the heart is filled.
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"I should hope so," Laigle replied, "for my coat and I live comfortably together. It has assumed all my wrinkles, does not hurt me anywhere, has moulded itself on my deformities, and is complacent to all my movements, and 1 only feel its presence because it keeps me warm."
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There is a determined though unseen bravery that defends itself foot by foot in the darkness against the fatal invasions of necessity and dishonesty. Noble and mysterious triumphs that no eye sees, and no fame rewards, and no flourish of triumph salutes. Life, misfortunes, isolation, abandonment, poverty, are battlefields that have their heroes; obscure heroes, sometimes greater than the illustrious heroes.
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Prayer is an august avowal of ignorance.
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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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Common sense is in spite of, not as the result of education.
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Dieu se manifeste à nous au premier degré à travers la vie de l’univers, et au deuxième degré à travers la pensée de l’homme. La deuxième manifestation n’est pas moins sacrée que la première. La première s’appelle la Nature, la deuxième s’appelle l’Art.
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Rhyme, that enslaved queen, that supreme charm of our poetry, that creator of our meter.
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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.
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Idleness is the heaviest of all oppressions.
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Sorrow is a fruit. God does not make it grow on limbs too weak to bear it.
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Amnesty is as good for those who give it as for those who receive it. It has the admirable quality of bestowing mercy on both sides.
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We see past time in a telescope and present time in a microscope. Hence the apparent enormities of the present.
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Should we continue to look upwards? Is the light we can see in the sky one of those which will presently be extinguished? The ideal is terrifying to behold... brilliant but threatened on all sides by the dark forces that surround it: nevertheless, no more in danger than a star in the jaws of the clouds.
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The drama is complete poetry. The ode and the epic contain it only in germ; it contains both of them in a state of high development, and epitomizes both.
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Who then can calculate the path of the molecule? how do we know that the creations of worlds are not determined by the fall of grains of sand?
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Evil. Mistrust those who rejoice at it even more than those who do it.
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A joyous little creature, so beautiful, It was as if a gate of Heaven opened as she came in.
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The man who does not know other languages, unless he is a man of genius, necessarily has deficiencies in his ideas.
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In every French village there is now a lighted torch, the schoolmaster; and a mouth trying to blow it out, the priest.
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Justice has its anger, my lord Bishop, and the wrath of justice is an element of progress. Whatever else may be said of it, the French Revolution was the greatest step forward by mankind since the coming of Christ. It was unfinished, I agree, but still it was sublime. It released the untapped springs of society; it softened hearts, appeased, tranquilized, enlightened, and set flowing through the world the tides of civilization. It was good. The French Revolution was the anointing of humanity.
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Where the telescope ends the microscope begins, and which has the wider vision?
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Curiosity is gluttony. To see is to devour.