Explore the most impactful and insightful quotes and sayings by Victor Hugo, and enrich your perspective with the wisdom. Share these inspiring Victor Hugo quotes pictures with your friends on social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, or your personal blogs, completely free. Here are the top 1673 Victor Hugo quotes for you to read and share.
A person who is seated instead of standing erect - destinies hang upon such a thing as that. -- Victor Hugo
He had enlightened Marius by chance and without being aware of the fact, as does a candle which some one brings; he had been the candle and not the some one. -- Victor Hugo
He had to accept the fate of every newcomer to a small town where there are plenty of tongues that gossip and few minds that think. -- Victor Hugo
Desiring always to be in mourning, he clothed himself with night. -- Victor Hugo
Oh! if the good hearts had the fat purses, how much better everything would go! -- Victor Hugo
Tobacco is the plant that converts thoughts into dreams. -- Victor Hugo
Why was I not made of stone like thee?
Quasimodo[to a gargoyle on the ramparts of Notre Dame as Esmeralda rides off with Gringoire]. -- Victor Hugo
Suddenly she let fly with this: "It's nice here!"
It was a ghastly dump, but she felt free. -- Victor Hugo
The great acts of love are done by those who are habitually performing small acts of kindness. -- Victor Hugo
Happy, even in anguish, is he to whom God has given a soul worthy of love and grief! He who has not seen the things of this world, and the heart of men in this double light, has seen nothing, and knows noting of the truth. -- Victor Hugo
Nature sometimes joins her effects and her appearances to our acts with a sort of serious and intelligent appropriateness; as if she would compel us to reflect. -- Victor Hugo
Having an immense reserve fund of wrath to get rid of, and not knowing what to do with it, he continued to address his daughter as you instead of thou for the next three months. -- Victor Hugo
In our civilization there are fearful hours - such are those when the criminal law pronounces shipwreck upon a man. What a mournful moment is that in which society withdraws itself and gives up a thinking being forever. -- Victor Hugo
The mother ... swinging the children by pulling on a length of string, while at the same time she kept and eye on them with that protective watchfulness, half animal, half angelic, which is the quality of motherhood. -- Victor Hugo
Gavroche had fallen only to rise again; he sat up, a long stream of blood rolled down his face, he raised both arms in air, looked in the direction whence the shot came, and began to sing. -- Victor Hugo
Because things are not agreeable," said Jean Valjean, "that is no reason for being unjust towards God. -- Victor Hugo
It may be remarked in passing that success is an ugly thing. Men are deceived by its false resemblances to merit. To the crowd, success wears almost the features of true mastery, and the greatest dupe of this counterfeit talent is History. -- Victor Hugo
Men are still men. The despot's wickedness Comes of ill teaching, and of power's excess,
Comes of the purple he from childhood wears, Slaves would be tyrants if the chance were theirs. -- Victor Hugo
Nobody loves the light like the blind man. -- Victor Hugo
We are drawn to what we lack. No one loves daylight more than a blind man. -- Victor Hugo
In the morning, when he entered my room, I grumbled, but he was like the sunlight to me, all the same. One cannot defend oneself against those brats. They take hold of you, they hold you fast, they never let you go again. The truth is, that there never was a cupid like that child. -- Victor Hugo
A cloud has been collecting for 1500 years, yet you are condemning the thunderclap. Its wrath will be absolved by the future. Its result is a better world; and a caress for the human race issues from its most terrible blows. The human race has been chastised, but it has moved onward. -- Victor Hugo
The paradise of the rich is made out of the hell of the poor. -- Victor Hugo
Science is continually correcting what it has said. Fertile corrections ... science is a ladder ... poetry is a winged flight ... An artistic masterpiece exists for all time ... Dante does not efface Homer. -- Victor Hugo
When you shall have learned to know, and to love, you will still suffer. The day is born in tears. The luminous weep, if only over those in darkness. -- Victor Hugo
Another said , I don't ask six months, I don't ask two. In less than two weeks we'll meet the government face to face. With twenty-five thousand men we can make our stand. -- Victor Hugo
Sire, you are looking at a plain man, and I am looking at a great man. Each of us may benefit. -- Victor Hugo
To fall into it again in appearance was to leave it behind in reality! He had to do it! He would have done nothing if he didn't do that! His whole life would have been useless, all his penitence wasted, and there would be only one thing left to say: What is the point? -- Victor Hugo
Thus is youth constituted; it quickly wipes its eye; it believes sorrow useless and does not accept it. Youth is the smile of the future before an unknown being which is itself. It is natural for it to be happy. IT seems as though it breathed hope. -- Victor Hugo
For it seems that a woman must needs be a mother in order to be venerable. -- Victor Hugo
If she had not been a gypsy, and if he had not been a priest -- Victor Hugo
With a remainder of that brotherly compassion which is never totally absent from the heart of a drinker, Phoebus rolled Jehan with his foot onto one of those poor man's pillows which Providence provides on all the street corners of Paris and which the rich disdainfully refer to as heaps of garbage. -- Victor Hugo
It is a terrible thing to be happy! How pleased we are with it! How all-sufficient we think it! How, being in possession of the false aim of life, happiness, we forget the true aim, duty! -- Victor Hugo
Success is a very hideous thing. Its false resemblance to merit deceives men. -- Victor Hugo
He sought not to efface sorrow by forgetfulness, but to magnify and dignify it by hope. He said: - Have a care of the manner in which you turn towards the dead. Think not of that which perishes. Gaze steadily. You will perceive the living light of your well-beloved dead in the depths of heaven. -- Victor Hugo
Death has its revelations: the great sorrows which open the heart open the mind as well; light comes to us with our grief. As for me, I have faith; I believe in a future life. How could I do otherwise? My daughter was a soul; I saw this soul. I touched it, so to speak. -- Victor Hugo
Be a religion to each other. Each man has his own fashion of adoring God. Saperlotte! the best way to adore God is to love one's wife. I love thee! that's my catechism. He who loves is orthodox. -- Victor Hugo
There are fathers who do not love their children; there is no grandfather who does not adore his grandson. -- Victor Hugo
The thirst for the Infinite proves infinity. -- Victor Hugo
Love is the foolishness of men, and the wisdom of God. -- Victor Hugo
Emergencies have always been necessary to progress. It was darkness which produced the lamp. It was fog that produced the compass. It was hunger that drove us to exploration. And it took a depression to teach us the real value of a job. -- Victor Hugo
This book is a drama, whose leading personage is the Infinite. -- Victor Hugo
Whom man kill, God restores to life; whom the brothers pursue the Father redeems. Pray and believe and go onward into life. You Father is there. -- Victor Hugo
The pupil dilates in darkness and in the end finds light, just as the soul dilates in misfortune and in the end finds God. -- Victor Hugo
He flew into a rage on every occasion, most frequently when wrong. -- Victor Hugo
When I see humanity ripped apart and events patched up, and so many spots on the sun and so many holes in the moon, when I see so much misery everywhere, I suspect that God is not rich. The appearance exists, it is true, but I feel that he is hard up. -- Victor Hugo
This book should be read as one would read the book of a dead man. -- Victor Hugo
Nothing is more real than those great seismic shocks that two souls give each other in exchanging that spark. -- Victor Hugo
Nothing is more true, more real, than the primeval magnetic disturbances that two souls may communicate to one another, through the tiny sparks of a moment's glance. -- Victor Hugo
The women laughed and wept; the crowd stamped their feet enthusiastically, for at that moment Quasimodo was really beautiful. He was handsome - this orphan, this foundling, this outcast. -- Victor Hugo
So different are the colours of life, as we look forward to the future, or backward to the past; and so different the opinions and sentiments which this contrariety of appearance naturally produces, that the conversation of the old and young ends generally with contempt or pity on either side. -- Victor Hugo
The cruel of heart have their own black happiness. -- Victor Hugo
Friendship exists outside our modern economy of scarcity ... It's not about apportioning vanishing resources of time and energy. Friendship is a blessed relic of the ancient economy of the gift, and the time freely given to people dear to you actually creates magical abundance. -- Victor Hugo
He was not to perceive that of two men engaged in an action so hideous, he who permits the thing is worse than the man who does the work, because he is the coward! -- Victor Hugo
Ninety-three was the war of Europe against France, and of France against Paris. And what was the Revolution? It was the victory of France over Europe, and of Paris over France. Hence the immensity of that terrible moment?, '93, greater than all the rest of the century -- Victor Hugo
When those we love are in question, our prudence invents every sort of madness. -- Victor Hugo
I dedicate this book to the rock of hospitality and liberty, to that portion of old Norman ground inhabited by the noble nation of the sea, to the island of Guernsey, severe yet kind, my present asylum, my probable tomb. -- Victor Hugo
She had had sweet dreams, which possibly arose from the fact that her little bed was very white. -- Victor Hugo
The first symptom of love in a young man is shyness; the first symptom in a woman, it's boldness. -- Victor Hugo
The misery of a child is interesting to a mother, the misery of a young man is interesting to a young woman, the misery of an old man is interesting to nobody. This of all miseries is the coldest. -- Victor Hugo
Good night! Good night!
Far flies the light;
But still God's love
Shall shine above,
Making all bright,
Good night! Good night! -- Victor Hugo
To understand the nature of the Revolution we must call it "progress"; and we may define progress by the word "tomorrow". -- Victor Hugo
Large, heavy, ragged black clouds hung like crape hammocks beneath the starry cope of the night. You would have said that they were the cobwebs of the firmament. -- Victor Hugo
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. -- Victor Hugo
A woman's best qualities are harmful if undiluted with prudence. -- Victor Hugo
The first symptom of true love in a man is timidity, in a young woman, boldness. This is surprising, and yet nothing is more simple. It is the two sexes tending to approach each other and assuming each the other's qualities. -- Victor Hugo
Certain thoughts are prayers. There are moments when, whatever be the attitude of the body, the soul is on its knees. -- Victor Hugo
To introduce a new play only six weeks after another has been banned is also a way to speak one's piece to the government. It proves that art and liberty can grow back in one night under the clumsy foot which crushes them. -- Victor Hugo
The reflection of a fact is in itself a fact. -- Victor Hugo
He asked himself ... whether it was not outrageous for society to treat thus precisely those of its members who were the least well endowed in the division of goods made by chance, and consequently the most deserving of consideration. -- Victor Hugo
As for us, we respect the past here and there, and we spare it, above all, provided that it consents to be dead. If it insists on being alive, we attack it, and we try to kill it. -- Victor Hugo
I only take a half share in the civil war; I am willing to die, I am not willing to kill. -- Victor Hugo
Strong and rare natures are thus created; misery, almost always a stepmother, is sometimes a mother; privation gives birth to power of soul and mind; distress is the nurse of self-respect; misfortune is a good breast for great souls. -- Victor Hugo
He was at that period of life when the mind of men who think is composed, in nearly equal parts, of depth and ingenuousness. A grave situation being given, he had all that is required to be stupid: one more turn of the key, and he might be sublime. -- Victor Hugo
Poetry contains philosophy as the soul contains reason. -- Victor Hugo
Homer is one of the men of genius who solve that fine problem of art - the finest of all, perhaps - truly to depict humanity by the enlargement of man: that is, to generate the real in the ideal. -- Victor Hugo
Marius and Cosette did not ask where this would lead them. They looked at themselves as arrived. It is a strange pretension for men to ask that love should lead them somewhere. -- Victor Hugo
Be like the bird that, passing on her flight awhile on boughs too slight, feels them give way beneath her, and yet sings, knowing that she hath wings. -- Victor Hugo
The moment comes when protest is not enough; reason must give way to action, and force ensure what thought has conceived. -- Victor Hugo
A torch-flame resembles the wisdom of cowards: it gives a poor light because it trembles. -- Victor Hugo
These are dark radiances. They have no suspicion that they are to be pitied. Certainly they are so. He who does not weep does not see. They are to be admired and pitied, as one would both pity and admire a being at once night and day, without eyes beneath his lashes but with a star on his brow. -- Victor Hugo
An opulent priest is a contradiction. -- Victor Hugo
A man trying to escape never thinks himself sufficiently concealed. -- Victor Hugo
Revery, which is thought in its nebulous state, borders closely upon the land of sleep, by which it is bounded as by a natural frontier. -- Victor Hugo
Alas! sir," said Gringoire, "I would that I could lend you some, but, my breeches are worn to holes, and 'tis not crowns which have done it. -- Victor Hugo
One hardly dares to say, nowadays, that two beings fell in love because they looked at each other. That is the way people do fall in love, nevertheless, and the only way. -- Victor Hugo
The power of a glance has been so much abused in love stories, that it has come to be disbelieved in. Few people dare now to say that two beings have fallen in love because they have looked at each other. Yet it is in this way that love begins, and in this way only. -- Victor Hugo
Here we stop. On the threshold of wedding nights stands an angel smiling, a finger to his lips. -- Victor Hugo
We pray together, we are afraid together, and then we go to sleep. Even if Satan came into the house, no one would interfere. After all, what is there to fear in this house? There is always one with us who is the strongest. Satan may visit our house, but the good Lord lives here. -- Victor Hugo
Melancholy is the happiness of being sad. -- Victor Hugo
The cities make ferocious men because they may corrupt man. The mountain, the sea, the forest, make savage men; they development fierce side, but often without destroying the humane side. -- Victor Hugo
Human thought has no limit. At its risk and peril, it analyzes and dissects its own fascination. We could almost say that, by a sort of splendid reaction, it fascinates nature; the mysterious world surrounding us returns what it receives; it is likely that contemplators are contemplated. -- Victor Hugo
Daring is the price of progress. All splendid conquests are the prize of boldness, more or less. -- Victor Hugo
The first symptom of true love in man is timidity, in a girl it is boldness. -- Victor Hugo
We are not loved by our friends for what we are; rather, we are loved in spite of what we are. -- Victor Hugo
Everything speaks: the flowing airstream and the sailing halycon, the blade of grass, the flower, the bud, the element; did you imagine the universe to be otherwise? -- 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
A good mayor is a useful person. How can you hold back when you have the chance to do good? -- Victor Hugo
Love one another dearly, always. Nothing else in the world really matters but that: to love one another. -- Victor Hugo
[ ... ] the purifying action of Conscience upsets the legal order. -- Victor Hugo
Nothing supplies the place of this instinct. All the nuns in the world are not worth as much as one mother in the formation of a young girl's soul. -- Victor Hugo
Release is not the same as liberation. You get out of jail, all right, but you never stop being condemned. -- Victor Hugo
Death belongs only to God. What right have men to lay hands on a thing so unknown? -- Victor Hugo
Sleep in Peace, God is awake. -- Victor Hugo
Those who do deeds sovereignly great are always sure of being served by somebody in the multitude. -- Victor Hugo
In saying no to progress, it is not the future which they condemn, but themselves. They give themselves a melancholy disease; they inoculate themselves with the past. There is but one way of refusing tomorrow, that is to die. -- Victor Hugo
The men of yesterday are spectres; those of to-morrow are forms. The eye of the spirit distinguishes them but obscurely. The embryonic work of the future is one of the visions of philosophy. -- Victor Hugo
Always and everywhere people are to be found who have seen everything. -- Victor Hugo
He sleeps although so much he was denied. He lived and when his dear love left him died. It happened of itself, in the easy way that in the morning night time follows day -- Victor Hugo
O darkness, the sky is a gloomy precinct Whose door you close, and whose key the soul owns; And night divides itself in half, being diabolical and holy, Between Ilis, the black angel, and Christ, the starry Human Being. -- Victor Hugo
Carve as we will the mysterious block of which our life is made, the black vein of destiny constantly reappears in it. -- Victor Hugo
It seems as though, at the approach of a certain dark hour, the light of heaven infills those who are leaving the light of earth. -- Victor Hugo
We are in the hands of those gods, those monsters, those giants: our thoughts. -- Victor Hugo
Alas! What are all these lives driven willy-nilly? Where are they going? Why are they like this? He who knows the answer to that, sees the darkness as a whole. He is alone. His name is God. -- Victor Hugo
Despotism is a long crime. -- Victor Hugo
The Convention promulgated this great axiom: "The liberty of one citizen ends where the liberty of another citizen begins," which comprises in two lines the entire law of human society. -- Victor Hugo
He feels himself buried in those two infinities, the ocean and the sky, at one and the same time: the one is a tomb; the other is a shroud. -- Victor Hugo
"Dost thou understand? I love thee!" he cried again."What love!" said the unhappy girl with a shudder.He resumed,
"The love of a damned soul. -- Victor Hugo
A little girl without a doll is almost as unhappy, and quite as impossible, as a woman without children. from chapter VIII of Les Miserables -- Victor Hugo
God gives air to men; the law sells it to them. -- Victor Hugo
Thought is the toil of the intelligence, revery its voluptuousness. To replace thought with revery is to confound a poison with a food. -- Victor Hugo
If there is anything more heart-breaking than a body perishing for lack of bread, it is a soul which is dying from hunger for the light. -- Victor Hugo
Certain persons are malicious solely through a necessity for talking. Their conversation, the chat of the drawing-room, gossip of the anteroom, is like those chimneys which consume wood rapidly; they need a great amount of combustibles; and their combustibles are furnished by their neighbors. -- Victor Hugo
Joy's smile is much closer to tears than laughter. -- Victor Hugo
God manifests himself to us in the first degree through the life of the universe, and in the second degree through the thought of man. The second manifestation is not less holy than the first. The first is named Nature, the second is named Art. -- Victor Hugo
But secondly you say 'society must exact vengeance, and society must punish'. Wrong on both counts. Vengeance comes from the individual and punishment from God. -- Victor Hugo
[He] had to submit to the fate of every newcomer in a small town, where many tongues talk but few heads think. -- Victor Hugo
The need of the immaterial is the most deeply rooted of all needs. One must have bread; but before bread, one must have the ideal. -- Victor Hugo
It is grievous for a man to leave behind him a shadow in his own shape. -- Victor Hugo
The real human division is this: the luminous and the shady. To diminish the number of the shady, to augment the number of the luminous, - that is the object. That is why we cry: Education! science! To teach reading, means to light the fire; every syllable spelled out sparkles. -- Victor Hugo
The future has many names: For the weak, it means the unattainable. For the fearful, it means the unknown. For the courageous, it means opportunity. -- Victor Hugo
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. -- Victor Hugo
The future has several names. For the weak, it is impossible; for the fainthearted, it is unknown; but for the valiant, it is ideal. -- Victor Hugo
Nature is pitiless; she never withdraws her flowers, her music, her fragrance, and her sunlight from before human cruelty or suffering. -- Victor Hugo
What's our baggage? Only vows,
Happiness, and all our care,
And the flower that sweetly shows
Nestling lightly in your hair. -- Victor Hugo
It is the lineaments of the years which form the countenance of the century. -- Victor Hugo
A frightful exchange of metaphors took place between the maskers and the crowd. -- Victor Hugo
As long as ignorance and misery exist in the world, books like the one you are about to read are, perhaps, not entirely useless -- Victor Hugo
Mothers arms are made of tenderness, And sweet sleep blesses the child who lies therein. -- Victor Hugo
Fame must have enemies, as light must have gnats. -- Victor Hugo
She worked in order to live, and presently fell in love, also in order to live, for the heart, too, has its hunger. -- Victor Hugo
So you're giving up? That's it? Okay, okay. We'll leave you alone, Quasimodo. We just thought, maybe you're made up of something much stronger. -- Victor Hugo
How frightened hypocrisy hastens to defend itself. -- Victor Hugo
We say that slavery has vanished from European civilization, but this is not true. Slavery still exists, but now it applies only to women and its name is prostitution. -- Victor Hugo
It is the property of grief to cause the childish side of man to reappear. -- Victor Hugo
One can resist the invasion of an army but one cannot resist the invasion of ideas. -- Victor Hugo
God will bless you,' said he, 'you are an angel since you take care of the flowers.'
'No,' she replied. 'I am the devil, but that's all the same to me. -- Victor Hugo
It is very easy to be kind; the difficulty lies in being just. -- Victor Hugo
Every day has its great grief or its small anxiety ... One cloud is dispelled, another forms. There is hardly one day in a hundred of real joy and bright sunshine. -- Victor Hugo
You need not tell me who you are. This is not my house; it is the house of Christ. It does not ask any comer whether he has a name but whether he has an affliction. -- Victor Hugo
With a tiny bit of effort, the nettle would be useful; if you neglect it, it becomes a pest. So then we kill it. How many men are like nettles ... My friends, there is no such thing as a weed and no such thing as a bad man. There are only bad cultivators. -- Victor Hugo
Each region of Paris is celebrated for the interesting treasures which are to be found there. There are ear-wigs in the timber-yards of the Ursulines, there are millepeds in the Pantheon, there are tadpoles in the ditches of the Champs-de-Mars. -- Victor Hugo
She is resigned, with that resignation resembling indifference as death resembles sleep. -- Victor Hugo
In Burgundy and in the cities of the South the tree of Liberty was planted. That is to say, a pole topped by the revolutionary red bonnet. -- Victor Hugo
Do you know what friendship is ... it is to be brother and sister; two souls which touch without mingling, two fingers on one hand. -- Victor Hugo
Nothing is really small; whoever is open to the deep penetration of nature knows this. -- Victor Hugo
Strong and bitter words indicate a weak cause. -- Victor Hugo
To sum up all, let it be known that science and religion are two identical words. The learned do not suspect this, no more do the religious. These two words express the two sides of the same fact, which is the infinite. Religion-Science, this is the future of the human mind. -- Victor Hugo
The arms of mothers are made of tenderness; in them children sleep profoundly. -- Victor Hugo
To err is human. To loaf is Parisian. -- Victor Hugo
Gavroche added: "I authorize you to hit 'em a tremendous whack. -- Victor Hugo
If we wish to be happy, monsieur, we must never comprehend duty; for, as soon as we comprehend it, it is implacable. One would say that it punishes you for comprehending it; but no, it rewards you for it; for it puts you into a hell where you feel God at your side. -- Victor Hugo
Bonapartist democrat."
"Grey shades of a quiet mouse colour. -- Victor Hugo
Is it not the best pity, when a man has a sore point, not to touch it at all? -- Victor Hugo
It does not do to let the senses fall asleep, whether in the shade of the sacred tree or in the shadow of an army. -- Victor Hugo
Listen, Monsieur Director, here's what I think. Obviously this is wrong. There are twenty-six of you in five or six small rooms; there are three of us in space enough for sixty. That is wrong, I assure you. You have my house and I am in yours. Give me back mine and this will be your home. -- Victor Hugo
Son, brother, father, lover, friend. There is room in the heart for all the affections, as there is room in heaven for all the stars. -- Victor Hugo
What is said about men often has as much influence upon their lives, and especially upon their destinies, as what they do. -- Victor Hugo
A harmony established contrary to sense is often more onerous than a war. -- Victor Hugo
A poet is a world enclosed in a man. -- Victor Hugo
It is a mournful task to break the sombre attachments of the past. -- Victor Hugo
He had never known a "kind woman friend" in his native parts. He had not had the time to fall in love. -- Victor Hugo
Hence, that crown is the money of hell. -- Victor Hugo
When love has fused and mingled two beings in a sacred and angelic unity, the secret of life has been discovered so far as they are concerned; they are no longer anything more than the two boundaries of the same destiny; they are no longer anything but the two wings of the same spirit. Love, soar. -- Victor Hugo
What is Waterloo? A victory? No. The winning number in the lottery. -- Victor Hugo
With just the 'Carmagnole' to sing he will only overthrow Louis XVI; but give him the 'Marseillaise' and he will liberate the world. -- Victor Hugo
Marius saw in Bonaparte the dazzling spectre which will always rise upon the frontier, and which will guard the future. Despot but dictator; a despot resulting from a republic and summing up a revolution. Napoleon became for him the man-people as Jesus Christ is the man-God. -- Victor Hugo
The scaffold is the accomplice of the executioner; it devours, it eats flesh, it drinks blood; the scaffold is a sort of monster fabricated by the judge and the carpenter, a spectre which seems to live with a horrible vitality composed of all the death which it has inflicted. -- Victor Hugo
Let us sacrifice one day to gain perhaps a whole life. -- Victor Hugo
I believe, sir, in all the progress. Air navigation is the result of the oceanic navigation: from water the human has to pass in the air. Everywhere where creation will be breathable to him, the human will penetrate into the creation. Our only limit is life. -- Victor Hugo
There is a point when the unfortunate and the infamous are associated and confused in a word, a mortal word, les miserables -- Victor Hugo
For the rest, he was the same to all men, the fashionable world and the ordinary people. He judged nothing in haste, or without taking account of the cirumstances. He said, 'Let me see how the fault arose. -- Victor Hugo
The infinite space that each man carries within himself, wherein despairingly he contrasts the movement of his spirit with the acts of his life, is and overpowering thing. -- Victor Hugo
This first glance of a soul which does not yet know itself is like dawn in the heavens; it is the awakening of something radiant and unknown. -- Victor Hugo
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? -- Victor Hugo
Ignominy thirsts for respect. -- Victor Hugo
Go to sleep in peace. God is awake. -- Victor Hugo
There is a material advancement; we desire it. There is, also, a moral grandeur; we hold fast to it. -- Victor Hugo
There is no rapture in the love which is prompted by esteem; such affection is lasting, not passionate. -- Victor Hugo
He had no shelter, no bread, no fire, no love; but he was merry because he was free. -- Victor Hugo
Where the telescope ends the microscope begins, and who can say which has the wider vision? -- Victor Hugo
He thought her more beautiful than ever, with a beauty that was at once feminine and angelic, that wholeness of beauty that had moved Petrarch to song and brought Dante to his knees. -- Victor Hugo
Revolutions spring not from an accident, but from necessity. A revolution is a return from the fictitious to the real. It is because it must be that it is. -- Victor Hugo
Monsieur, innocence is its own crown! Innocence has only to act to be noble! She is as august in rags as fleur de lys. -- Victor Hugo
All generous social irradiations spring from science, letters, arts, education. Make men, make men. Give them light that they may warm you. Sooner or later the splendid question of universal education will present itself with the irresistible authority of the absolute truth; and -- Victor Hugo
Oh, to lie side by side in the same tomb, hand in hand, and to gently touch a finger-tip from time to time in the darkness, would suffice for my eternity.
You who suffer because you love, love more than ever. To die for love is to live by it. -- Victor Hugo
The best minds have their soft spots and sometimes feel somewhat bruised by the scant respect of logic. -- Victor Hugo
Whoever you may be, if your name is Prejudice, Abuse, Ignorance, Oppression, Iniquity, Despotism, Injustice, Fanaticism, Tyranny, beware of the gaping gamin. The little fellow will grow up. -- Victor Hugo
The world of sleep has an existence of its own. -- Victor Hugo
We must never fear robbers or murderers. They are dangers from outside, small dangers. It is ourselves we have to fear. Prejudice is the real robber, vice the real murderer. Why should we be troubled by a threat to our person or our pocket? What we have to beware of is the threat to our souls'. -- Victor Hugo
Let us fear ourselves. Prejudices are the real robbers; vices are the real murderers. The great dangers lie within ourselves. -- Victor Hugo
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. -- Victor Hugo
He endeavored to collect his thoughts, but did not succeed. At those hours especially when we have sorest need of grasping the sharp realities of life do the threads of though snap off in the brain. -- Victor Hugo
His brain was in one of those states that are both violent and yet frighteningly calm, in which thought runs so deep it blots out reality. You no longer see the objects around you, yet you can see the shapes in your mind as thought they are outside your body. -- Victor Hugo
A chair is not a caste. -- Victor Hugo
In the morning I write love letters and in the afternoon I dig graves -- Victor Hugo
Let us fear the worst, but work with faith; the best will always take care of itself. -- Victor Hugo
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
Woe, alas, to those who have loved only bodies, forms, appearances! Death will rob them of everything. Try to love souls, you will find them again. -- Victor Hugo
A garden to walk in and immensity to dream in
what more could he ask? A few flowers at his feet and above him the stars. -- Victor Hugo
Everything bows to success, even grammar. -- Victor Hugo
When we reach out to pluck a flower the stem trembles, seeming both to shrink and to offer itself. The human body has something of this tremor at the moment when the mysterious hand of death reaches out to pluck a soul. -- Victor Hugo
Geniuses are disconcerting. Their comings and goings in the ideal world give one vertigo ... They have a telescope in one eye and a microscope in the other. -- Victor Hugo
You are adorable, mademoiselle. I study your feet with the microscope and your soul with the telescope. -- Victor Hugo
It is one of the poignant anxieties of the thinker that he sees the shadow resting on the human soul, and that he gropes in darkness without being able to awaken that slumbering Progress. -- Victor Hugo
On the other hand, this affair afforded great delight to Madame Magloire. -- Victor Hugo
One sees qualities at a distance and defects at close range. -- Victor Hugo
Every man is a book in which God himself writes. -- Victor Hugo
The peasants of the Asturias believe that in every litter of wolves there is one pup that is killed by the mother for fear that on growing up it would devour the other little ones. -- Victor Hugo
Table talk and Lovers' talk equally elude the grasp; Lovers' Talk is clouds, Table Talk is smoke.
Les Miserables -- Victor Hugo
Do not economize on the hymeneal rites; do not prune them of their splendor, nor split farthings on the day when you are radiant. A wedding is not house-keeping. -- Victor Hugo
What Is Love? I have met in the streets a very poor young man who was in love. His hat was old, his coat worn, the water passed through his shoes and the stars through his soul -- Victor Hugo
There are no trivial facts in humanity, nor little leaves in vegetation. -- Victor Hugo
This is the shade of meaning: the door of a physician should never be closed; the door of a priest should always be open. -- Victor Hugo
An increase of tenderness always ended by boiling over and turning to indignation. He was at the point where we seek to adopt a course, and to accept what tears us apart. -- Victor Hugo
Memory is a gulf that a word can move to its lowest depths. -- Victor Hugo
When I speak to you about myself, I am speaking to you about yourself. How is it you don't see that? -- Victor Hugo
His judgement demonstrates that one can be a genius and understand nothing of an art that is not one's own. -- Victor Hugo
Jean Valjean disconcerted him. All the axioms which had served him as points of support all his life long, had crumbled away in the presence of this man. Jean Valjean's generosity towards him, Javert, crushed him. -- Victor Hugo
In short, between men and women you want ... "
"Equality."
"Equality! You can't mean it. Man and woman are two different creatures."
"I said equality. I didn't say identity. -- Victor Hugo
I am a soul. I know well that what I shall render up to the grave is not myself. That which is myself will go elsewhere. Earth, thou art not my abyss! -- Victor Hugo
There is a point, moreover, at which the unfortunate and the infamous are associated and confounded in a single word, Les Miserables; whose fault is it? And then, is it not when the fall is lowest that charity ought to be greatest? -- Victor Hugo
My revenge is fraternity! No more frontiers! The Rhine for everyone! Let us be the same Republic, let us be the United States of Europe, let us be the continental federation, let us be European liberty, let us be universal peace! -- Victor Hugo
He who has not been a determined accuser during prosperity should hold his peace in adversity. -- Victor Hugo
He who despairs is wrong. Progress infallibly awakens, and, in short, we might say that it advances even in sleep, for it has grown. -- Victor Hugo
His whole life was now summed up in two words: absolute uncertainty within an impenetrable fog. -- Victor Hugo
The soul of the just contemplates in sleep a mysterious heaven. -- Victor Hugo
Laughter is sunshine, it chases winter from the human face. -- Victor Hugo
You say, "Where goest Thou?" I cannot tell, And still go on. But if the way be straight I cannot go amiss: before me lies Dawn and the day: the night behind me: that Suffices me: I break the bounds: I see, And nothing more; believe and nothing less. My future is not one of my concerns. -- Victor Hugo
My fellow, you strike me at present as being situated in the moon, kingdom of dream, province of illusion, capital: Soap-Bubble. -- Victor Hugo
He did not study God; he was dazzled by him. -- Victor Hugo
The cold and bitter scorn of the passers-by penetrated her very flesh and soul like a north wind. -- Victor Hugo
When grace is joined with wrinkles, it is adorable. There is an unspeakable dawn in happy old age. -- Victor Hugo
The barber in his shop, warmed by a good stove, was shaving a customer and casting from time to time a look towards this enemy, this frozen and brazen gamin, who had both hands in his pockets, but his wits evidently out of their sheath. -- Victor Hugo
Most commonly revolt is born of material circumstances; but insurrection is always a moral phenomenon. Revolt is Masaniello, who led the Neapolitan insurgents in 1647; but insurrection is Spartacus. Insurrection is a thing of the spirit, revolt is a thing of the stomach. -- Victor Hugo
As we see, he had a strange and peculiar way of judging things. I suspect that he acquired it from the Gospel. -- Victor Hugo
In the moment when the eyes of the two men met, Javert, without having moved or made the least gesture, became hideous. No human emotion can wear an aspect so terrible as that of jubilation. He had the face of a fiend who has found the victim he thought he had lost. -- Victor Hugo
The sacred law of Jesus Christ governs our civilization, but it does not, as yet, permeate it; it is said that slavery has disappeared from European civilization. This is a mistake. It still exists; but it weighs only upon the woman, and it is called prostitution. -- Victor Hugo
There were corpses here and there and pools of blood. I remember seeing a butterfly flutter up and down that street. Summer does not abdicate. -- Victor Hugo
There is no vacuum in the human heart. Certain demolitions take place, and it is well that they do, but on condition that they are followed by reconstructions. -- Victor Hugo
The greatest products of architecture are less the works of individuals than of society; rather the offspring of a nation's effort, than the inspired flash of a man of genius ... -- Victor Hugo
Light renders healthy. -- Victor Hugo
These are true felicities. No joy beyond these joys. Love is the only ecstasy, everything else weeps -- Victor Hugo
Knowledge is a weight added to conscience. -- Victor Hugo
Freedom begins where it ends ignorance -- Victor Hugo
Dark Error's other hidden side is truth. -- Victor Hugo
A house is built of logs and stone, of tiles and posts and piers; a home is built of loving deeds that stand a thousand years. -- Victor Hugo
CHAPTER I - M. MYRIEL -- Victor Hugo
But, reverend master, it is not sufficient to pass one's life, one must earn the means for life. -- Victor Hugo
His only theatre is the free show that god provides, the sky and the stars, flowers and children, mankind who's sufferings he shares and the created world in which he is trying his wings -- Victor Hugo
Out Milky Way is the dwelling; the nebulae are the city. -- Victor Hugo
And there's a woman dressed in white, who's nice to hear, and soft to touch, and she whispers, 'Colette, I love you very much' I have a place where no one is ost, and where no one cries, because crying is not aloud, on my Castle In the Clouds -- Victor Hugo
When your day has been teeming with different sensations, when you have things on your mind, you can get to sleep to start with but you can't get back to sleep. Sleep comes a lot more easily than it comes back. -- Victor Hugo
The sunshine was delightful, the foliage gently astir, more from the activity of birds than from the breeze. One gallant little bird, doubtless lovelorn, was singing his heart out at the top of a tall tree. -- Victor Hugo
A smile is the same as sunshine; it banishes winter from the human countenance. -- Victor Hugo
History has its truth, and so has legend. Legendary truth is of another nature than historical truth. Legendary truth is invention whose result is reality. Furthermore, history and legend have the same goal; to depict eternal man beneath momentary man. -- Victor Hugo
To study in Paris is to be born in Paris! -- Victor Hugo
Genius is a promontory jutting out into the infinite. -- Victor Hugo
No matter who you are, the thought of so much suffering and degradation must cause you to shudder at the sight of a veil or cassock, those two shrouds of human invention. -- Victor Hugo
Each man should frame life so that at some future hour fact and his dreaming meet. -- Victor Hugo
Javert, though hideous, was not ignoble. -- Victor Hugo
And must I now begin to doubt - who never doubted all these years? My heart is stone, and still it trembles. The world I have known is lost in the shadows. Is he from heaven or from hell? And does he know, that granting me my life today, this man has killed me, even so.
- Javert -- Victor Hugo
He was troubled; this brain, so limpid in its blindness, had lost its transparency; there was a cloud in this crystal. -- Victor Hugo
Without knowing it, Javert in his awful happiness was deserving of pity, like every ignorant man who triumphs. Nothing could have been more poignant or more heartrending than that countenance on which was inscribed all the evil in what is good. -- Victor Hugo
The peasants of Asturias are convinced that in every litter of wolves there is one dog, which is killed by the mother because, otherwise, as he grew up, he would devour the other little ones. Give to this dog-son of a wolf a human face, and the result will be Javert. -- Victor Hugo
One thing had amazed him, - this was that Jean Valjean should have done him a favor, and one thing petrified him, - that he, Javert, should have done Jean Valjean a favor. -- Victor Hugo
I am in the night. There is a being who has gone away and carried the heavens with her. Oh! to be laid side by side in the same tomb, hand clasped in hand, and from time to time, in the darkness, to caress a finger gently, that would suffice for my eternity. -- Victor Hugo
The episcopal palace of D - - adjoins the hospital. -- Victor Hugo
in becoming malicious he only picked up the weapon with which he had been wounded. He -- Victor Hugo
He sought ... to transform the grief which looks down into the grave by showing it the grief which looks up to the stars. -- Victor Hugo
All is not at an end on earth since we can still talk nonsense. -- Victor Hugo
Love resembles a tree: it bends under its own weight, deeply rooted in our being and sometimes turns green in the ruins of a heart. -- Victor Hugo
and the goodman beheld this apparition, which had bare feet and a tattered petticoat, running about among the flower-beds distributing life around her. The sound of the watering-pot on the leaves filled Father Mabeuf's soul with ecstasy. It seemed to him that the rhododendron was happy now. -- Victor Hugo
I was confided to your loyalty and accepted by your treason; you offer my death to those to whom you had promised my life. Do you know who it is you are destroying here? It is yourself. -- Victor Hugo
This very slight change had worked a revolution. -- Victor Hugo
O Josephine, face more than irregular, you would be charming were you not all askew. You have the air of a pretty face upon which some one has sat down by mistake. -- Victor Hugo
The souls of the upright in sleep have vision of a mysterious heaven. -- Victor Hugo
Love, in the eyes of the world, is either a carnal appetite or a vague fancy, which possession extinguishes or absence destroys. That is why it is commonly said, with a strange abuse of words, that passion does not endure. -- Victor Hugo
My coat and I live comfortably togther. 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 I only feel its presence because it keeps me warm. Old coats and old friends are the same thing. -- Victor Hugo
Abstruse speculations contain vertigo. -- Victor Hugo
He who contemplates the depths of Paris is seized with vertigo.
Nothing is more fantastic. Nothing is more tragic.
Nothing is more sublime. -- Victor Hugo
Animals are nothing but the portrayal of our virtues and vices made manifest to our eyes, the visible reflections of our souls. -- Victor Hugo
Monsieur Bienvenu was simply a man who accepted these mysterious questions ... and who had in his soul a deep respect for the mystery which enveloped them. -- Victor Hugo
Argot is both a literary and a social phenomenon. What is argot, properly speaking? Argot is the language of misery. -- Victor Hugo
He was at his own request and through his own complicity driven out of all his happinesses one after the other; and he had this sorrow, that after having lost Cosette wholly in one day, he was afterwards obliged to lose her again in detail. -- Victor Hugo
The pun is the dung of the mind which soars. The jest falls, no matter where; and the mind after producing a piece of stupidity plunges into the azure depths. -- Victor Hugo
Table talk and amorous talk are equally impossible to grasp; amorous talk is all pretty bubbles, table talk, hot air. -- Victor Hugo
Music expresses that which cannot be put into words and that which cannot remain silent -- Victor Hugo
All our heroism stems from our womenfolk. A man without a woman is like a pistol without a hammer;;the woman sparks the charge -- Victor Hugo
It is from books that wise people derive consolation in the troubles of life. -- Victor Hugo
To be hated! to love with all the fury of one's soul; to feel that one would give for the least of her smiles, one's blood, one's vitals, one's fame, one's salvation, one's immortality and eternity, -- Victor Hugo
Great blunders are often made, like large ropes, of a multitude of fibers. Take the cable thread by thread, take separately all the little determining motives, you break them one after another, and you say: that is all! Wind them and twist them together, they become an enormity. -- Victor Hugo
Forget not, never forget that you have promised me to use this silver to become an honest man ... Jean Valjean, my brother: you belong no longer to evil, but to good. It is your soul that I am buying for you. I withdraw it from dark thoughts and from the spirit of perdition, and I give it to God! -- Victor Hugo
In the future no one will kill anyone, the earth will shine, the human race will love. It will come, citizens, the day when all will be peace, harmony, light, joy, and life, it will come. And it is so that it comes that we are going to die. -- Victor Hugo
He is the best gentleman that is the son of his own deserts, and not the degenerated heir of another's virtue. -- Victor Hugo
People who are crushed do not look behind them. They know but too well the evil fate which follows them. -- Victor Hugo
Ah! There you are! he exclaimed, looking at Jean Valjean. I'm so glad to see you. Well, but how is this? I gave you the candlesticks too, which are of silver like the rest, and for which you can certainly get two hundred francs. Why did you not carry them away with your forks and spoons? -- Victor Hugo
Thus those two beings, so exclusively and touchingly devoted, who had lived so long for each other alone, came to suffer side by side, each through the other, without ever speaking of the matter, without reproaches, each wearing a smile. -- Victor Hugo
pottery and household utensils down on the soldiers from the roofs; a bad sign; and when this matter was reported to Marshal Soult, Napoleon's old lieutenant grew thoughtful, as he recalled Suchet's saying at Saragossa: "We are lost when the old women empty their pots de chambre on our heads." These -- Victor Hugo
when both are sincere and good, no men so penetrate each other, and so amalgamate with each other, as an old priest and an old soldier. At bottom, the man is the same. The one has devoted his life to his country here below, the other to his country on high; that is the only difference. -- Victor Hugo
Paris is a sum total. Paris is the ceiling of the human race. All this prodigious city is an epitome of dead and living manners and customs. He who sees Paris, seems to see all history through with the sky and constellations in the intervals. -- Victor Hugo
If you ask the great city, 'Who is this person?,' she will answer, 'He is my child. -- Victor Hugo
All of you, all who are present
consider me worthy of pity, do you
not? Good God! When I think of what I was on the point of doing, I
consider that I am to be envied. -- Victor Hugo
To breathe Paris is to preserve one's soul. -- Victor Hugo
He said to himself that he really had not suffered enough to deserve such radiant happiness, and he thanked God, in the depths of his soul, for having permitted that he, a miserable man, should be so loved by this innocent being.
Jean Valjean about Cossette -- Victor Hugo
There are moments when a rope's end, a pole, the branch of the tree, is life itself, and it is a frightful thing to see a living being lose his hold upon it, and fall like a ripe fruit. -- Victor Hugo
One would have called it a luminous wound. -- Victor Hugo
It is the accursed inventions of this century that are ruining everything--artilleries, bombards, and, above all, printing, that other German pest. No more manuscripts, no more books! printing will kill bookselling. It is the end of the world that is drawing nigh. -- Victor Hugo
Every bird which flies has the thread of the infinite in its claw. Germination includes the hatching of a meteor and the tap of a swallow's bill breaking the egg, and it leads forward the birth of an earth-worm and the advent of Socrates. -- Victor Hugo
There is a secret drawer in every woman's heart. -- Victor Hugo
Work is the law of life, and to reject it as boredom is to submit to it as torment. -- Victor Hugo
And after all in this house what have we to fear? There is always someone with us who is stronger. The devil may visit us, but God lives here. -- Victor Hugo
He loved books, those undemanding but faithful friends. -- Victor Hugo
A thousand men enslaved fear one beast free. -- Victor Hugo
The greatest happiness in life is the conviction that we are loved; loved for ourselves, or moreover, loved in spite of ourselves. -- Victor Hugo
The supreme happiness of life consists in the conviction that one is loved; loved for one's own sake
let us say rather, loved in spite of one's self. -- Victor Hugo
The visit took place. It was a formidable campaign; a nocturnal battle against pestilence and suffocation. -- Victor Hugo
The greatest happiness of life is the conviction that we are loved
loved for ourselves, or rather, loved in spite of ourselves. -- Victor Hugo
Go out in the world and work like money doesn't matter, sing as if no one is listening, love as if you have never been hurt, and dance as if no one is watching. -- Victor Hugo
Paris, viewed from the towers of Notre Dame in the cool dawn of a summer morning, is a delectable and a magnificent sight; and the Paris of that period must have been eminently so. -- Victor Hugo
Hope is the Word which God has written on the brow of every man. -- Victor Hugo
Love partakes of the soul itself. it is of the same nature. like it, it is a divine spark, like it, it is incorruptible, indivisible, imperishable, it is the point of fire which is within us, which is immortal and infinite, which nothing can limit and nothing can extinguish. -- Victor Hugo
Three great problems of the century - the degradation of man through pauperism, the corruption of woman through hunger, the crippling of children through lack of light - are unsolved; -- Victor Hugo
She loved with so much passion as she loved with ignorance. She did not know whether it were good or evil, beneficent or dangerous, necessary or accidental, eternal or transitory, permitted or prohibited: she loved. -- Victor Hugo
There are souls which, crab-like, crawl continually toward darkness, going back in life rather than advancing in it, using what experience they have to increase their deformity, growing worse without ceasing, and becoming steeped more and more thoroughly in an intensifying wickedness. -- Victor Hugo
Symmetry is tedious, and tedium is the very basis of mourning. Despair yawns. -- Victor Hugo
During a wise man's whole life, his destiny holds his philosophy in a state of siege. -- Victor Hugo
I love all men who think, even those who think otherwise than myself. -- Victor Hugo
Who has been unhooking the stars without my permission, and putting them on the table in the guise of candles? -- Victor Hugo
Hell is an outrage on humanity. When you tell me that your deity made you in his image, I reply that he must have been very ugly. -- Victor Hugo
The delight we inspire in others has this enchanting peculiarity that, far from being diminished like every other reflection, it returns to us more radiant than ever. -- Victor Hugo
Ladies, a second piece of advice
do not marry; marriage is a graft; it may take hold or not. Shun the risk. -- Victor Hugo
Words being but a breath, the stir of awakened minds is like the rustling of leaves. -- Victor Hugo
Her heart ached, but she took her resolution. It will be seen that Fantine possessed the stern courage of life. -- Victor Hugo
In becoming dirt, she has been turned to stone. To touch her is to feel a chill. -- Victor Hugo
Cosette was not very timid by nature. There flowed in her veins some of the blood of the bohemian and the adventuress who runs barefoot. It will be remembered that she was more of a lark than a dove. There was a foundation of wildness and bravery in her -- Victor Hugo
Let us say it now: to be blind and to be loved, is indeed, upon this earth where nothing is complete, one of the most strangely exquisite forms of happiness. -- Victor Hugo
No religion but blasphemes a little. -- Victor Hugo
A queen, devoid of beauty is not queen;
She needs the royalty of beauty's mien. -- Victor Hugo
The real, native South Seas food is lousy. You can't eat it. -- Victor Hugo
I encountered in the street a penniless young man who was in love. His hat was old and his jacket worn, with holes at the elbows; water soaked through his shoes, but starlight flooded through his soul. -- Victor Hugo
A cannonball travels only two thousand miles an hour; light travels two hundred thousand miles a second. Such is the superiority of Jesus Christ over Napoleon. -- Victor Hugo
He, "how many beds do you think this hall alone would hold?" "Monseigneur's dining-room?" exclaimed -- Victor Hugo
Enjolras caught glimpses of a luminous uprising under the dark skirts of the future. -- Victor Hugo
Dirt has been shrewdly termed misplaced material. -- Victor Hugo
From suffering to suffering, he had gradually arrived at the conviction that life is a war; and that in this war he was the conquered. -- Victor Hugo
She had spears of straw and grass in her hair, not like Ophelia gone mad through contact with Hamlet's madness, but because she had slept in some stable loft. -- Victor Hugo
With the exception of wars of liberation, everything that armies do is by foul means. -- Victor Hugo
When they saw him making money, they said, "He is a man of business." When they saw him scattering his money about, they said, "He is an ambitious man." When he was seen to decline honors, they said, "He is an adventurer." When they saw him repulse society, they said, "He is a brute. -- Victor Hugo
That it was no doubt a dark hour, but that he should get through it; that after all he held his destiny, evil as it might be, in his own hand; that he was master of it. He clung to that thought. -- Victor Hugo
He kissed the handkerchief, inhaled its perfume, put it over his heart, against his flesh in the daytime, and at night went to sleep with it on his lips.
"I feel her whole soul in it!" he exclaimed.
The handkerchief belonged to the old gentleman, who had simply dropped it from his pocket. -- Victor Hugo
To live a life which is a perpetual falsehood is to suffer unknown tortures. -- Victor Hugo
To rescue from oblivion even a fragment of a language which men have used and which is in danger of being lost -that is to say, one of the elements, whether good or bad, which have shaped and complicated civilization -is to extend the scope of social observation and to serve civilization. -- Victor Hugo
We teachers make the road, others will make the journey. -- Victor Hugo
Idleness is a mother. She has a son, robbery, and a daughter, hunger. -- Victor Hugo
Toleration is the best religion. -- Victor Hugo
Thus, during those nineteen years of torture and slavery, did this soul rise and fall at the same time. Light entered on the one side, and darkness on the other. -- Victor Hugo
Books are cold, but sure friends indeed. -- Victor Hugo
It is man's consolation that the future is to be a sunrise instead of a sunset. -- Victor Hugo
We are on the side of religion as opposed to religions, and we are among those who believe in the wretched inadequacy of sermons and the sublimity of prayer. -- Victor Hugo
It is chiefly at the moment when there is the greatest need for attaching them to the painful realities of life, that the threads of thought snap within the brain. -- Victor Hugo
The infinite exists. It is there. If the infinite had no me, the me would be its limit; it would not be the infinite; in other words, it would not be. But it is. Then it has a me. This me of the infinite is God. -- Victor Hugo
The straight line, a respectable optical illusion which ruins many a man. -- Victor Hugo
A saint addicted to excessive self-abnegation is a dangerous associate; he may infect you with poverty, and a stiffening of those joints which are needed for advancement-in a word, with more renunciation than you care for-and so you flee the contagion. -- Victor Hugo
Brothers, he who dies here dies in the radiance of the future, and we are entering a tomb all flooded with the dawn. -- Victor Hugo
The claw, that's the beast that enters your flesh; the sucker, that's you yourself who enters into the beast. ( ... ) Beyond the terror of being eaten alive is the ineffability of being drunk alive. -- Victor Hugo
When a person opens a book, he can never be in prison. -- Victor Hugo
God blesses man, not for having found but for having sought. -- Victor Hugo
Men hate those to whom they have to lie. -- Victor Hugo
What is the true story of Fantine? It is the story of society's purchase of a slave. A slave purchased from poverty, hunger, cold, loneliness, defencelessness, destitution. A squalid bargain: a human soul for a hunk of bread. Poverty offers and society accepts. -- Victor Hugo
our judgement of a man would be much sounder were it based on what he dreams rather than on what he thinks. -- Victor Hugo
On the one side blind force, on the other a soul. -- Victor Hugo
This child whom we Love, Brings daylight Into our soul. -- Victor Hugo
We do not comprehend everything, but we insult nothing. -- Victor Hugo
We may be indifferent to the death penalty and not declare ourselves either way so long as we have not seen a guillotine with our own eyes. But when we do, the shock is violent, and we are compelled to choose sides, for or against ... Death belongs to God alone. -- Victor Hugo
There is a way of avoiding which resembles seeking. -- Victor Hugo
To destroy abuses is not enough; Habits must also be changed. The windmill has gone, but the wind is still there."
~old man G--- to Monseigneur Bienvenu Myriel -- Victor Hugo
CHAPTER V - MONSEIGNEUR BIENVENU MADE HIS CASSOCKS LAST TOO LONG -- Victor Hugo
There are men who dig for gold; [Monseigneur Bienvenu] dug for compassion. -- Victor Hugo
Monseigneur Bienvenu was simply a man who took note of the exterior of mysterious questions without scrutinizing them, and without troubling his own mind with them, and who cherished in his own soul a grave respect for darkness. -- Victor Hugo
Did not i say that things would come right of themselves? said the Bishop. Then he added, with a smile, To him who contents himself with the surplice of a curate, God sends the cope of an archbishop. Monseigneur, murmured the cure, throwing back his head with a smile. God or the Devil. -- Victor Hugo
What is fright by night is curiosity by day. -- Victor Hugo
You who are Prejudice, Abuse, Ignominy, Oppression, Iniquity, Despotism, Injustice, Fanaticism, beware of the wide-eyed urchin. He will grow up. -- Victor Hugo
She took recourse to the expedient of constantly terrified children. She lied. -- Victor Hugo
The realities of life do not allow themselves to be forgotten. -- Victor Hugo
A day will come when there will be no battlefields, but markets opening to commerce and minds opening to ideas. -- Victor Hugo
You always have everything better than the rest, even pain. -- Victor Hugo
Love is an old invention but it is one that is always new. Make the most of it. -- Victor Hugo
There is still a certain grace in a dead festival. It has been happy. Upon those chairs in disarray, among those flowers which are withering, under those extinguished lights, there have been thoughts of joy. -- Victor Hugo
If no one loved, the sun would go out. -- Victor Hugo
Faith is necessary to men; woe to him who believes in nothing! -- Victor Hugo
Slaves would be tyrants were the chance theirs. -- Victor Hugo
There is a way of avoiding a person which resembles a search. -- Victor Hugo
Be a bird perched on a frail branch that she feels bending beneath her, still she sings away all the same, knowing she has wings. -- Victor Hugo
the phantom of social justice tormented him. -- Victor Hugo
We need those who pray constantly to compensate for those who do not pray at all. -- Victor Hugo
He who every morning plans the transactions of that day and follows that plan carries a thread that will guide him through the labyrinth of the most busy life. -- Victor Hugo
The victory of humanity over man.
Humanity had conquered the inhuman.
And by what means? In what way? How had it overcome the giant of anger and hatred? What arms had it used? What engine of war? The cradle. -- Victor Hugo
I wanted to see you again, touch you, know who you were, see if I would find you identical with the ideal image of you which had remained with me and perhaps shatter my dream with the aid of reality.
-Claude Frollo -- Victor Hugo
The senator...was a smart man who had made his way in life with a single-mindedness oblivious to any of those stumbling blocks known as conscience, sworn oaths, justice, duty... -- Victor Hugo
He was fond of books, for they are cool and sure friends -- Victor Hugo
It is often necessary to know how to obey a woman in order sometimes to have the right to command her. -- Victor Hugo
There are moments when the hands of a woman possess super human force. -- Victor Hugo
Love is jealous, and ingenious in self-torture in proportion as it is pure and intense. -- Victor Hugo
On the contrary, as there is always more misery among the lower classes than there is humanity in the higher, everything was given away, so to speak, before it was received, like water on thirsty soil; it was well that money came to him, for he never kept any, and besides he robbed himself. -- Victor Hugo
At a certain depth of distress, the poor, in their stupor, groan no longer over evil, and are no longer thankful for good. -- Victor Hugo
She was sad with an obscure sadness of which she had not the secret herself. There was in her whole person the stupor of a life ended but never commenced. -- Victor Hugo
At the hour of civilization through which we are now passing, and which is still so sombre, the miserable's name is Man; he is agonizing in all climes, and he is groaning in all languages. -- Victor Hugo
This humble soul loved, and that was all. -- Victor Hugo
The pupil dilates in the night, and at last finds day in it, even as the soul dilates in misfortune, and at last finds God in it. -- Victor Hugo
Children at once accept joy and happiness with quick familiarity, being themselves naturally all happiness and joy. -- Victor Hugo
We live in a sad society. Succeed--that is the advice which falls drop by drop from the overhanging corruption. In passing, we might say that success is a hideous thing. Its false similarity to merit deceives men. -- Victor Hugo
Smallness in a great man seems smaller by its disproportion with all the rest. -- Victor Hugo
What would be ugly in a garden constitutes beauty in a mountain. -- Victor Hugo
Our life dreams the Utopia. Our death achieves the Ideal. -- Victor Hugo
For sight is woman-like and shuns the old. -- Victor Hugo
For true poetry, complete poetry, consists in the harmony of contraries. Hence, it is time to say aloud
and it is here above allthat exceptions prove the rule
that everything that exists in nature exists in art. -- Victor Hugo
Inspiration and genius--one and the same. -- Victor Hugo
Phenomena intersect; to see but one is to see nothing. -- Victor Hugo
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. During this journey in 1825 -- Victor Hugo
At the moment when her eyes closed, when all feeling vanished in her, she thought that she felt a touch of fire imprinted on her lips, a kiss more burning than the red-hot iron of the executioner. -- Victor Hugo
Whatever may be happening today, peace is the meaning of tomorrow -- Victor Hugo
To destroy abuses is not sufficient; customs must be modified. The mill is there no longer; the wind is still there. -- Victor Hugo
Look not at the face, young girl, look at the heart. The heart of a handsome young
man is often deformed. There are hearts in which love does not keep. Young girl, the
pine is not beautiful; it is not beautiful like the poplar, but it keeps its foliage in
winter. -- Victor Hugo
A people, 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. -- Victor Hugo
There is suffering in the light; in excess it burns. Flame is hostile to the wing. To burn and yet to fly, that is the miracle of genius. -- Victor Hugo
The presence of angels is an announcement of Paradise. -- Victor Hugo
In the animal world no creature born to be a dove turns into a scavenger. This happens only among men. -- Victor Hugo
A creature so beautiful that God would have preferred her to the Virgin and have chosen her for his mother and have wished to be born of her if she had been in existence when he was made man! -- Victor Hugo
To love is to act. -- Victor Hugo
The provincial dandy wore the longest of spurs and the fiercest of mustaches. -- Victor Hugo
A certain amount of tempest is always mingled with a battle. Quid obscurum, quid divinum. Each historian traces, to some extent, the particular feature which pleases him amid this pell-mell. -- Victor Hugo
Thenardier had just passed his fiftieth birthday; Madame Thenardier was approaching her forties, which is equivalent to fifty in a woman; so that there existed a balance of age between husband and wife. -- Victor Hugo
Madame Thenardier was approaching her forties, which is equivalent to fifty in a woman ... -- Victor Hugo
A tempest ceases, a cyclone passes over, a wind dies down, a broken mast can be replaced, a leak can be stopped, a fire extinguished, but what will become of this enormous brute of bronze? -- Victor Hugo
A man is not idle because he is absorbed in thought. There is visible labor and there is invisible labor. -- Victor Hugo
She was a lovely blonde, with fine teeth. She had gold and pearls for her dowry; but her gold was on her head, and her pearls were in her mouth. -- Victor Hugo
If merely for the sake of exactness in all points, -- Victor Hugo
The beautiful is as useful as the useful." He added after a moment's silence, "Perhaps more so. -- Victor Hugo
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. -- Victor Hugo
The counterfeits of the past take assumed names, and are fond of calling themselves the future. That eternally returning spector, the past, not infrequently falsifies its passport. -- Victor Hugo
Style is the shape the ideal takes, rhythm, its movement. -- Victor Hugo
He had come to the supreme crossing of good and evil. He had that gloomy intersection beneath his eyes. On this occasion once more, as had happened to him already in other sad vicissitudes, two roads opened out before him, the one tempting, the other alarming. Which was he to take? -- Victor Hugo
The peculiar property of truth is never to commit excesses. What need has it of exaggeration? There -- Victor Hugo
What is history? An echo of the past in the future; a reflex from the future on the past. -- Victor Hugo
He set out for Toulon. He arrived there, after a journey of twenty-seven days, on a cart, with a chain on his neck. At Toulon he was clothed in the red cassock. All that had constituted his life, even to his name, was effaced; he was no longer even Jean Valjean; he was number 24,601. -- Victor Hugo
The sins of women and children, domestic servants and the weak, the poor and the ignorant, are the sins of the husbands and fathers, the masters, the strong and the rich and the educated. -- Victor Hugo
What says the law? You will not kill. How does it say it? By killing! -- Victor Hugo
The soul of a young girl should not be left in the dark; later on, mirages that are too abrupt and too lively are formed there, as in a dark chamber. -- Victor Hugo
Venerate the man, whoever he may be, who has this sign - the starry eye. -- Victor Hugo
Nature has made a pebble and a female. The lapidary makes the diamond, and the lover makes the woman. -- Victor Hugo
God has made the cat to give man the pleasure of caressing the tiger. -- Victor Hugo
No artist desires to prove anything. Even things that are true can be proved. No artist has ethical sympathies. An ethical sympathy in an artist is an unpardonable mannerism of style. No artist is ever morbid. The artist can express everything. -- Victor Hugo
The beautiful is just as useful as the useful. -- Victor Hugo
Virtue has a veil, vice a mask. -- Victor Hugo
Suffering engenders passion; and while the prosperous blind themselves, or go to sleep, the hatred of the unfortunate classes kindles its torch at some sullen or ill-constituted mind, which is dreaming in a corner, and sets to work to examine society. The examination of hatred is a terrible thing. -- Victor Hugo
As for wine, he drank water. -- Victor Hugo
Fex urbis, lex orbis" (The dregs of the city, the law of the earth), from Les Miserables, attributed to St. Jerome -- Victor Hugo
Wisdom and eloquence are not always united. -- Victor Hugo
But alas, if I have not maintained my victory, it is God's fault for not making man and the devil of equal strength. -- Victor Hugo
To speak out aloud when alone is as it were to have a dialogue with the divinity which is within. -- Victor Hugo
Nothing makes a man so adventurous as an empty pocket. -- Victor Hugo
Grantaire, earthbound in doubt, loved to watch Enjolras soaring in the upper air of faith. He needed Enjolras. Without being fully aware of it, or seeking to account for it himself, he was charmed by that chaste, upright, inflexible and candid nature. -- Victor Hugo
Wonderful nature has a double meaning, which dazzles great minds and blinds uncultivated souls. When man is ignorant, when the desert is filled with visions, the darkness of solitude is added to the darkness of intelligence; hence, in man, the possibilities of perdition -- Victor Hugo
Moreover, and we must not forget this, interests which are not very friendly to the ideal and the sentimental are in the way. Somestimes the stomach paralyzes the heart. -- Victor Hugo
The circumstances of happiness are not enough, there must also be peace of mind -- Victor Hugo
I bear the dungeon within me; within me is winter, ice, and despair; I have darkness in my soul. -- Victor Hugo
It is a shame that I am ignorant, otherwise I would quote to you a mass of things; but I know nothing. -- Victor Hugo
A miscreant with coiffed, scented hair, a slender waist, the hips of a woman and the chest of a Prussian officer, with a finely tied cravat, by all girls admired. ~ [introduction of character Montparnasse] -- Victor Hugo
I see black light (his last words) -- Victor Hugo
This is the shade of difference: the door
of the physician should never be shut, the door of the priest should always be open. -- Victor Hugo
I don't want your money," said she. -- Victor Hugo
Every good quality runs into a defect; economy borders on avarice, the generous are not far from the prodigal, the brave man is close to the bully; he who is very pious is slightly sanctimonious; there are just as many vices to virtue as there are holes in the mantle of Diogenes. -- Victor Hugo
You shouldn't abuse the revolutionaries, Mother Streetcorner. My pistol is on your side. It's to help you find more things worth eating in your basket. -- Victor Hugo
He believed that faith gives health. He sought to counsel and calm the despairing by pointing out the Man of Resignation, and to transform the grief that contemplates the grave by showing it the grief that looks up to the stars. -- Victor Hugo
The past surged up before him facing the present; he compared them and sobbed. The silence of tears once opened, the despairing man writhed.
He felt that he had been stopped short. -- Victor Hugo
One would say, to see all these snow-flakes fall, that there was a plague of white butterflies in heaven. -- Victor Hugo
The best way to look at the soul is through closed eyes. -- Victor Hugo
From a political point of view, there is but one principle, the sovereignty of man over himself. This sovereignty of myself over myself is called Liberty -- Victor Hugo
Kings are for nations in their swaddling-clothes: France has attained her majority. -- Victor Hugo
He who despairs is wrong. -- Victor Hugo
There are certain natures which cannot have love on one side without hatred on the other. -- Victor Hugo
Laughter is the sun that drives winter from the human face. -- Victor Hugo
A one-eyed man is much more incomplete than a blind man, for he knows what it is that's lacking. -- 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
For there are things that make the dead open their eyes in their graves. -- Victor Hugo
She went back down to the garden, feeling like a queen, hearing the birds sing - this was in winter - seeing the sky all golden, the sun in the trees, flowers among the shrubs, bewildered, wild, giddy with inexpressible rapture. -- Victor Hugo
A strange thing has happened, do you know? I am in darkness. There is a person who, departing, took away the sun. -- Victor Hugo
No fear, no regrets. -- Victor Hugo
By degrees, however, they began to hope again. Such are our insubmergable mirages of the soul! There is no distress so complete but that even in the most critical moments the inexplicable sunrise of hope is seen in its depths. -- Victor Hugo
To know, to think, to dream. That is everything. -- Victor Hugo
God secludes Himself; but the thinker listens at the door. -- Victor Hugo
When God desires to destroy a thing, he entrusts its destruction to the thing itself. Every bad institution of this world ends by suicide. -- Victor Hugo
Common sense is in spite of, not the result of, education. -- Victor Hugo
The most excellent symbol of the people is the paving stone. One walks on it until it falls on one's head. -- Victor Hugo
Our mind is enriched by what we receive, our heart by what we give. -- Victor Hugo
There is a crime commited by the society against the individual,a crime that is commited afresh each day -- Victor Hugo
Jean Valjean opened his eyes wide, and stared at the venerable Bishop with an expression which no human tongue can render any account of. -- Victor Hugo
Tall and thin, Mademoiselle Baptistine was a pale and gentle person. She was the incarnation of the word 'respectable,' whereas to be 'venerable,' a woman should lso be a mother. -- Victor Hugo
The infinite has being. It is there. If infinity had no self then self would not be. But it is. Therefore it has a self. The self of infinity is God. -- Victor Hugo
There are, as we know, powerful and illustrious atheists. At bottom, led back to the truth by their very force, they are not absolutely sure that they are atheists; it is with them only a question of definition, and in any case, if they do not believe in God, being great minds, they prove God. -- Victor Hugo
If you are stone, be magnetic; if a plant, be sensitive; but if you are human be love. -- Victor Hugo
The sadness which reigned everywhere was but an excuse for unfailing kindness. -- Victor Hugo
Men like me are impossible until the day when they become necessary. -- Victor Hugo
Winter changes into stone the water of heaven and the heart of man. -- Victor Hugo
He had, they said, tasted in succession all the apples of the tree of knowledge, and, whether from hunger or disgust, had ended by tasting the forbidden fruit. -- Victor Hugo
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. -- Victor Hugo
We are for religion against the religions. -- Victor Hugo
True history being a mixture of all things, the true historian mingles in everything. -- Victor Hugo
His universal compassion was due less to natural instinct, than to a profound conviction, a sum of thoughts that in the course of living had filtered through to his heart: for in the nature of man, as in rock, there may be channels hollowed by the dropping of water, and these can never be destroyed. -- Victor Hugo
Nobody knows like a woman how to say things that are both sweet and profound. Sweetness and depth, this is all of woman; this is Heaven. -- Victor Hugo
This conflict between right and fact has endured since the origins of society. To bring the duel to an end, to consolidate the pure ideal with the human reality, to make the right peacefully interpenetrate the fact, and the fact the right, this is the work of the wise. -- Victor Hugo
It is difficult to frighten those who are easily astonished; ignorance causes fearlessness. Children have so little claim on hell, that if they should see it they would admire it. -- Victor Hugo
Youth, even in its sorrows, always possesses its own peculiar radiance. -- Victor Hugo
Once his decision had been taken, he waited for the right opportunity. It was not long coming. Old -- Victor Hugo
The English took the eagle and Austrians the eaglet.
[Fr., L'Angleterre prit l'aigle, et l'Autriche l'aiglon.] -- Victor Hugo
Succeed; that is the advice that falls, drop by drop, from the overhanging fruit of corruption. -- Victor Hugo
... plunged into chance,--that is to say, swallowed up in Providence -- Victor Hugo
It is ourselves we have to fear. Prejudice is the real robber, and vice the real murderer. -- Victor Hugo
Smoking blood, over-filled cemeteries, mothers in tears, - these are formidable pleaders. When the earth is suffering from too heavy a burden, there are mysterious groanings of the shades, to which the abyss lends an ear. -- Victor Hugo
If you wish to gain an idea of what revolution is, call it Progress; and if you wish to acquire an idea of the nature of progress, call it To-morrow. -- Victor Hugo
Man's greatest actions are performed in minor struggles. Life, misfortune, isolation, abandonment and poverty are battlefields which have their heroes - obscure heroes who are at times greater than illustrious heroes. -- Victor Hugo
He felt that to increase his knowledge was to strengthen his hatred. Under certain circumstances, instruction and enlightenment may serve as rallying points for evil. -- Victor Hugo
There is neither a foreign war nor a civil war; there is only just and unjust war. -- Victor Hugo
Nothing is more charming than the glow of happiness amid squalor. There is a rose-tinted attic in all our lives. -- Victor Hugo
The soul that loves and suffers is in the sublime state. -- Victor Hugo
A moment later he was in his garden, walking, meditating, contemplating, his heart and soul wholly absorbed in those grand and mysterious things which God shows at night to the eyes which remain open. -- Victor Hugo
We must be brief. -- Victor Hugo
Her soul trembled on her lips like a drop of dew on a flower. -- Victor Hugo
To place the infinity here below in contact, by the medium of thought, with the infinity on high, is called praying. -- Victor Hugo
For, to make deserts, God, who rules mankind, Begins with kings, and ends the work by wind. -- Victor Hugo
Good-will never added an onion to the soup, and is good for nothing but a passport to paradise. -- Victor Hugo
Errors make excellent projectiles. They strike it cleverly in its vulnerable spot, in default of a cuirass, in its lack of logic; -- Victor Hugo
Night sometimes lends such tragic assistance to catastrophe. -- Victor Hugo
My greatness does not extend to this shelf. -- Victor Hugo
It is the same with wretchedness as with everything else. It ends by becoming bearable. -- Victor Hugo
Death belongs only to God. By what right to men tamper with a thing so unknowable? -- Victor Hugo
A writer is a world trapped in a person. -- Victor Hugo
Laughter is like sunshine; it chases winter away from the human face. Cosette -- Victor Hugo
As we have just observed, nothing trains children to silence like unhappiness. -- Victor Hugo
No Prefect of Police believes that a cat can turn into a lion; nevertheless the thing happens ... -- Victor Hugo
The rich's paradise was created by the poor's hell. -- Victor Hugo
Pain is as diverse as man. One suffers as one can. -- Victor Hugo
She read aloud, as she understood better that way. In reading aloud you assume authority for what you are reading. There are people who read very loudly, and who appear to be giving their word of honor for what they are reading. -- Victor Hugo
Win a lottery-prize and you are a cleaver man. Winners are adulated. To be born with a caul is everything; luck is what matters. Be fortunate and you will be thought great. -- Victor Hugo
I advance in life, I grow more simple, and I become more and more patriotic for humanity. -- Victor Hugo
Among all these passionate hearts and all these undoubting minds there was one skeptic. How did he happen to be there? From juxtaposition. The name of this skeptic was Grantaire, and he usually signed with this rebus: R. Grantaire was a man who took good care not to believe in anything. -- Victor Hugo
It is by suffering that human beings become angels. -- Victor Hugo
The earth is a great piece of stupidity. -- Victor Hugo
Every step which the intelligence of Europe has taken has been in spite of the clerical party. -- Victor Hugo
A sewer is a cynic. It tells All. -- Victor Hugo
Sometimes he used a spade in his garden, and sometimes he read and wrote. He had but one name for these two kinds of labor; he called them gardening. 'The Spirit is a garden,' said he -- Victor Hugo
Habit is the nursery of errors. -- Victor Hugo