Victor Hugo Quotes - Page 2

Though one believes in nothing, there are moments in life when one accepts the religion of the temple nearest at hand.

One day of happiness is worth more than a lifetime of sorrow .... Under ordinary circumstances, jealousy is a suspicion to the person who excites it and degrading to the person who indulges it.

After he had fully determined that the young man was at the bottom of this state of affairs, and that it all came from him, he Jean Valjean, the regenerated man, the man who had laboured so much upon his soul, the man who had made so many efforts to resolve all life, all misery, and all misfortune into love; he looked within himself, and there he saw a spectre, Hatred.

This cavern is below all, and the enemy of all; it is hatred, without exception.

Revolutions spring not from accident, but from necessity. A revolution is a return from the factitious to the real. It takes place because it must.

Progress is not accomplished in one stage.

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.

Marius and Cosette were in the dark in regard to each other. They did not speak, they did not bow, they were not acquainted; they saw each other; and, like the stars in the sky separated by millions of leagues, they lived by gazing upon each other.

God will reward you,' he said. 'You must be an angel since you care for flowers.

In a little town, there are many mouths which talk, and very few heads which think.

The French Revolution, which is nothing more nor less than the ideal armed with the sword, rose abruptly, and by that very movement, closed the door of evil and opened the door of good.It released the question, promulgated truth, drove away miasma, purified the century, crowned the people.We can say it created man a second time, in giving him a second soul, his rights. Page 997 Saint-Denis chapter 7 Argot part III

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.

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.

Sin as little as possible-that is the law of mankind. Not to sin at all is the dream of the angel. All earthly things are subject to sin. Sin is like gravity.

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 awake that slumbering Progress.

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.

The driver, a black silhouette upon his box, whipped up his bony horses. Icy silence in the coach. Marius, motionless, his body braced in the corner of the carriage, his head dropping down upon his breast, his arms hanging, his legs rigid, appeared to await nothing now but a coffin; Jean Valjean seemed made of shadow, and Javert of stone.

Let us never weary of repeating, that to think first of the disinherited and sorrowful classes; to relieve, ventilate, enlighten, and love them; to enlarge their horizon to a magnificent extent; to lavish upon them education in every shape; to set them an example of labor, and never of indolence; to lessen the weight of the individual burden by increasing the notion of the universal aim; to limit poverty without limiting wealth; to create vast fields of public and popular activity; to have, like Briareus, a hundred hands to stretch out on all sides to the crushed and the weak; to employ the collective power in the grand task of opening workshops for every arm, schools for every aptitude, and laboratories for every intellect; to increase wages, diminish toil, and balance the debit and credit--that is to say, proportion enjoyment to effort, and supply to demand; in a word, to evolve from the social machine, on behalf of those who suffer and those who are ignorant, more light and more comfort, is (and sympathetic souls must not forget it) the first of brotherly obligations, and (let egotistic hearts learn the fact) the first of political necessities.

To attempt, to brave, to persist, and persevere, to be faithful to one's self, to wrestle with destiny, to astound the catastrophe by the slight fear which is causes us, now to confront unjust power, again to insult intoxicated victory, to hold firm and withstand -- such is the example which nations need and the light which electrifies them.

The terrible shock of his sentence had in some way broken that wall which separates us from the mystery of things beyond and which we call life.

You have enemies? Why, it is the story of every man who has done a great deed or created a new idea. It is the cloud which thunders around everything that shines. Fame must have enemies, as light must have gnats. Do no bother yourself about it; disdain. Keep your mind serene as you keep your life clear.

Thought is the toil of the intelligence, revery its voluptuousness. To replace thought with revery is to confound a poison with a food.

Intelligence is the wife, imagination is the mistress, memory is the servant.

In joined hands there is still some token of hope, in the clinched fist none.

Genuflection before the idol or the dollar destroys the muscles which walk and the will that moves.

where the telescope ends the microscope begins, and who can say which has the wider vision?

It is a false and dangerous situation which bases public power on private want, and roots the grandeur of the State in the suffering of the individual. It is a badly constituted grandeur which combines all the material elements, and into which no moral element enters.

It is not enough to be happy, one must be content.

Life is a flower of which love is the honey.

England has two books, the Bible and Shakespeare. England made Shakespeare,but the Bible made England.

Progress - the stride of God!

They are les misérables - the outcasts, the underdogs. And who is to blame? Is it not the most fallen who have most need of charity?

The sole social evil is darkness; humanity is identity, for all men are made of the same clay.

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.

I advance in life, I grow more simple, and I become more and more patriotic for humanity.

If they had had a different neighbour, one less sel-absorbed and more concerned for others, a man of normal, charitable instincts, their desperate state would not have gone unnoticed, their distress-signals would have been heard, and perhaps they would have been rescued by now. Certainly they appeared utterly depraved, corrupt, vile and odious; but it is rare for those who have sunk so low not to be degraded in the process, and there comes a point, moreover, where the unfortunate and the infamous are grouped together, merged in a single, fateful world. They are les misérables - the outcasts, the underdogs. And who is to blame? Is it not the most fallen who have most need for charity?

Love is the only future God offers.

In moments like these, offering up his heart at the hour that night flowers offer up their perfume, lit up like a lamp in the middle of the starry night, full of ecstasy in the middle of the universal radiance of creation, he could not perhaps have said himself what was happening in his spirit; he felt something soar up out of him and something fly down into him. Mysterious exchanges between the bottomless well of the soul and the bottomless well of the universe!

Intellectual and moral growth is no less indispensable than material improvement. Knowledge is a viaticum. Though is a prime necessity; truth is nourishment, like wheat. A reasoning faculty, deprived of knowledge and wisdom, pines away. We should feel the same pity for minds that do not eat as for stomachs. If there be anything sadder than a body perishing for want of bread, it is a mind dying of hunger for lack of light. All progress tends toward the solution. Some day, people will be amazed. As the human race ascends, the deepest layers will naturally emerge from the zone of distress. The effacement of wretchedness will be effected by a simple elevation level.

Monsieur, innocence is its own crown! Innocence has only to act to be noble! She is as august in rags as fleur de lys.

Common sense is in spite of, not the result of, education.

Certain thoughts are prayers. There are moments when, whatever be the attitude of the body, the soul is on its knees.

In all Thénardier's outpourings, the words and gestures, the fury blazing in his eyes, this explosion of an evil nature brazenly exposed, the mixture of bravado and abjectness, arrogance, pettiness, rage, absurdity; the hodgepodge of genuine distress, and lying sentiment, the shamelessness of a vicious man rejoicing in viciousness, the bare crudity of an ugly soul -- in this eruption of all suffering and hatred there was something which was hideous as evil itself and still as poignant as truth.

Nature is pitiless; she never withdraws her flowers, her music, her fragrance and her sunlight, from before human cruelty or suffering. She overwhelms man by the contrast between divine beauty and social hideousness. She spares him nothing of her loveliness, neither wing or butterfly, nor song of bird; in the midst of murder, vengeance, barbarism, he must feel himself watched by holy things; he cannot escape the immense reproach of universal nature and the implacable serenity of the sky. The deformity of human laws is forced to exhibit itself naked amidst the dazzling rays of eternal beauty. Man breaks and destroys; man lays waste; man kills; but the summer remains summer; the lily remains the lily; and the star remains the star....As though it said to man, 'Behold my work. and yours.

We do not claim that the portrait we are making is the whole truth, only that it is a resemblance.

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.

And do you know Monsieur Marius? I believe I was a little in love with you.

The saints were his friends, and blessed him; the monsters were his friends, and guarded him.

Wide horizons lead the soul to broad ideas; circumscribed horizons engender narrow ideas; this sometimes condemns great hearts to become small minded.Broad ideas hated by narrow ideas,—this is the very struggle of progress.

Blacheville smiles with the self-satisfied smugness of a man whose vanity is tickled

Dream no small dreams. They have no power to stir the hearts of men.

Passando fra gli insorti che si scostavano con religioso rispetto, [papà Mabeuf] continuò dritto verso Enjolras che indietreggiava impietrito, gli strappò la bandiera, e senza che nessuno osasse trattenerlo né aiutarlo, quel vecchio ottuagenario col capo vacillante, ma col piede fermo, salì lentamente la scala di pietre costruita nella barricata. Lo spettacolo era così serio che tutto all'intorno dissero: «Giù il cappello!». A ogni gradino che saliva diventava sempre più terribile: i suoi capelli canuti, il volto decrepito, l'ampia fronte calma e rugosa, gli occhi incavati, la bocca attonita e semiaperta, il vecchio braccio che sosteneva la bandiera rossa, uscivano dall'ombra e ingigantivano nel sanguinoso chiarore della torcia, e sembrava di vedere lo spettro del 1793 sorgere dalla terra inalberando la bandiera del terrore.Quando fu all'ultimo gradino, quando quel fantasma tremante e terribile, ritto su quel mucchio di rovine dinanzi a milleduecento fucili invisibili, si drizzò in faccia alla morte come se fosse più forte di essa, tutta la barricata assunse nelle tenebre un aspetto colossale e soprannaturale. Vi fu uno di quegli istanti di silenzio che accompagnano i prodigi. In mezzo a quel silenzio il vegliardo sventolò la bandiera rossa e gridò:«Viva la Rivoluzione! Viva la Repubblica! Fratellanza! Uguaglianza! E morte!».

Should we continue to look upwards? Is the light we can see in the sky one of those which will presently be extinguished? The ideal is terrifying to behold... brilliant but threatened on all sides by the dark forces that surround it: nevertheless, no more in danger than a star in the jaws of the clouds.

Sorrow is a fruit God does not allow it to grow on a branch that is too weak to bear it.

More powerful than the mighty armies is an idea whose time has come.

This is what men call genius, just as they call a painted face beauty and a richly attired figure majesty. The confound the brilliance of the firmament with the star-shaped footprints of a duck in the mud.

Usually, the murmur that rises up from Paris by day is the city talking; in the night it is the city breathing; but here it is the city singing. Listen, then, to this chorus of bell-towers - diffuse over the whole the murmur of half a million people - the eternal lament of the river - the endless sighing of the wind - the grave and distant quartet of the four forests placed upon the hills, in the distance, like immense organpipes - extinguish to a half light all in the central chime that would otherwise be too harsh or too shrill; and then say whetehr you know of anything in the world more rich, more joyous, more golden, more dazzling, than this tumult of bells and chimes - this furnace of music - these thousands of brazen voices, all singing together in flutes of stone three hundred feet high, than this city which is but one orchestra - this symphony which roars like a tempest.

Laughter is the sun that drives winter from the human race.

The realities of life do not allow themselves to be forgotten.

His ideas assumed a kind of stupefied and mechanical quality which is peculiar to despair.