Have courage for the great sorrows of life and patience for the small ones; and when you have laboriously accomplished your daily task, go to sleep in peace.
Victor HugoM. Mabeuf’s political opinion was a passionate fondness for plants, and a still greater one for books. He had, like everybody else, his termination in ist, without which nobody could have lived in those times, but he was neither a royalist, nor a Bonapartist, nor a chartist, nor an Orleanist, nor an anarchist; he was an old-bookist.
Victor HugoIt was SHE. Whoever has loved knows all the radiant meaning contained in the three letters of this word ‘she.
Victor HugoThat is the explanation of war, an outrage by humanity upon humanity in despite of humanity.
Victor HugoA stand can be made against invasion by an army; no stand can be made against invasion by an idea.
Victor HugoBut 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 HugoHow 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 HugoRevolutions spring not from accident, but from necessity. A revolution is a return from the factitious to the real. It takes place because it must.
Victor HugoThus, 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 HugoI met in the street a very poor young man who was in love. His hat was old, his coat worn, his cloak was out at the elbows, the water passed through his shoes, - and the stars through his soul.
Victor HugoIn this way, his unhappy soul struggled with its anguish. Eighteen hundred years before this unfortunate man, the mysterious Being, in whom all the sanctities and all the sufferings of humanity come together, He too, while the olive trees trembled in the fierce breath of the Infinite, had brushed away the fearful cup that appeared before him, streaming with shadow and running over with darkness, in the star-filled depths. (pg. 236)
Victor HugoThe human soul has still greater need of the ideal than of the real. It is by the real that we exist; it is by the ideal that we live.
Victor HugoEvery step which the intelligence of Europe has taken has been in spite of the clerical party.
Victor HugoSuccess is an ugly thing. Men are deceived by its false resemblances to merit.... They confound the brilliance of the firmament with the star-shaped footprints of a duck in the mud.
Victor HugoI advance in life, I grow more simple, and I become more and more patriotic for humanity.
Victor HugoPeople weighed down with troubles do not look back; they know only too well that misfortune stalks them.
Victor HugoHe who contemplates the depths of Paris is seized with vertigo. Nothing is more fantastic. Nothing is more tragic. Nothing is more sublime.
Victor HugoIn the Twentieth Century war will be dead, the scaffold will be dead, hatred will be dead, frontier boundaries will be dead, dogmas will be dead; man will live. He will possess something higher than all these-a great country, the whole earth, and a great hope, the whole heaven.
Victor HugoLove 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 HugoWhen we are at the end of life, to die means to go away; when we are at the beginning, to go away means to die.
Victor HugoWhen a man understands the art of seeing, he can trace the spirit of an age and the features of a king even in the knocker on a door.
Victor HugoHe saw before him two roads, both equally straight ; but he saw two; and that terrified him — him, who had never in his life known but one straight line. And, bitter anguish, these two roads were contradictory.
Victor HugoThe little people must be sacred to the big ones, and it is from the rights of the weak that the duty of the strong is comprised.
Victor HugoA day will come when a cannon will be exhibited in museums, just as instruments of torture are now, and the people will be astonished that such a thing could have been.
Victor HugoIn 1815, M. Charles-Francois-Bienvenu Myriel was Bishop of D—— He was an old man of about seventy-five years of age; he had occupied the see of D—— since 1806.
Victor HugoJustice has its anger, my lord Bishop, and the wrath of justice is an element of progress. Whatever else may be said of it, the French Revolution was the greatest step forward by mankind since the coming of Christ. It was unfinished, I agree, but still it was sublime. It released the untapped springs of society; it softened hearts, appeased, tranquilized, enlightened, and set flowing through the world the tides of civilization. It was good. The French Revolution was the anointing of humanity.
Victor Hugo