Victor Hugo Quotes

Who can be sure that Jean Valjean had not been on the verge of losing heart and giving up the struggle? In loving he recovered his strength. But the truth is that he was no less vulnerable than Cosette. He protected her and she sustained him. Thanks to him she could go forward into life, and thanks to her he could continue virtous. He was the child's support and she his mainstay. Sublime, unfathomable marvel of the balance of destiny!

Often when we think we are knotting one thread, we are tying quite another.

Scepticism, that dry caries of the intelligence.

Where the telescope ends the microscope begins, and which has the wider vision?

There have been in this century only one great man and one great thing: Napoleon and liberty. For want of the great man, let us have the great thing.

Philosophy should be an energy; it should find its aim and its effect in the amelioration of mankind.

We are not loved by our friends for what we are; rather, we are loved in spite of what we are.

Civil war? What does that mean? Is there any foreign war? Isn't every war fought between men, between brothers?

I love all men who think, even those who think otherwise than myself.

There is nothing like a dream to create the future.

To know how to distinguish the agitation arising from covetousness, from the agitation arising from principles, to fight the one and aid the other, in this lies the genius and the power of great revolutionary leaders.

The production of souls is the secret of unfathomable depth.

Habit is the nursery of errors.

One is not idle because one is absorbed. There is both visible and invisible labor. To contemplate is to toil, to think is to do. The crossed arms work, the clasped hands act. The eyes upturned to Heaven are an act of creation.

Jesus wept; Voltaire smiled. From that divine tear and from that human smile is derived the grace of present civilization.

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!

where would the shout of love begin, if not from the summit of sacrifice?

Religions do a useful thing: they narrow God to the limits of man. Philosophy replies by doing a necessary thing: it elevates man to the plane of God.

I had a dream my life would be different from this hell I am living, so different from what it seemed. Now life has killed the dream I dreamed.

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.

For prying into any human affairs, non are equal to those whom it does not concern.

No man is more unhappy than the one who is never in adversity; the greatest affliction of life is never to be afflicted.

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.

I have been loving you a little more every minute since this morning.

Reason is intelligence taking exercise. Imagination is intelligence with an erection.

Die, very good, but do not make others die. Suicides like the one which is about to take place here are sublime, but suicide is restricted, and does not allow of extension; and so soon as it affects your neighbors, suicide becomes murder.

The soul helps the body, and at certain moments raises it. It is the only bird that sustains its cage.

Beauty is as useful as the useful. More so, perhaps. (Le beau est aussi utile que l'utile. Plus peut-etre.)

When people look back at their childhood or youth, their wistfulness comes from the memory, not of what their lives had been in those years, but of what life had then promised to be. The expectation of some indefinable splendor, of the unusual, the exciting, the great is an attribute of youth and the process of aging is the process of that expectations' gradual extinction. One does not have to let it happen. But that fire dies for lack of fuel, under the gray weight of disappointments.

If you don't build castles in the air you won't build anything on the ground.

Great perils have this beauty, that they bring to light the fraternity of strangers.

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.

The paradise of the rich is made out of the hell of the poor.

A compliment is something like a kiss through a veil.

Promise to give me a kiss on my brow when I am dead. --I shall feel it." She dropped her head again on Marius' knees, and her eyelids closed. He thought the poor soul had departed. Eponine remained motionless. All at once, at the very moment when Marius fancied her asleep forever, she slowly opened her eyes in which appeared the sombre profundity of death, and said to him in a tone whose sweetness seemed already to proceed from another world:-- "And by the way, Monsieur Marius, I believe that I was a little bit in love with you.

Everything Changes. The only thing that remains immovable across the centuries and fixes the character of a people is cooking.

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.

Nothing is so stifling as symmetry. Symmetry is boredom, the quintessence of mourning. Despair yawns. There is something more terrible than a hell of suffering - a hell of boredom.

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.

If people did not love one another, I really don't see what use there would be in having any spring.

Sorrow is a fruit. God does not make it grow on limbs too weak to bear it.

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

Spira, spera. (breathe, hope)

I refuse the oration of all churches. I ask a prayer of all souls. I believe in God.

The most powerful symptom of love is a tenderness which becomes at times almost insupportable.

All roads are blocked to a philosophy which reduces everything to the word "no." To "no" there is only one answer and that is "yes." Nihilism has no substance. There is no such thing as nothingness, and zero does not exist. Everything is something. Nothing is nothing. Man lives more by affirmation than by bread.

A man without a woman is like a pistol without a trigger; it is the woman who makes the man go off.

Whom man kills, him God restoreth to life.