Top 990 Quotes & Sayings by Victor Hugo - Page 12

by making himself a priest made himself a demon.

Hope is a delusion; no hand can grasp a wave or a shadow.

Slaves would be tyrants were the chance theirs.

I'd rather be hissed at for a good verse, than applauded for a bad one.

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?

He reached for his pocket, and found there, only reality

One resists the invasion of armies; one does not resist the invasion of ideas.

He did not study God; he was dazzled by him.

One drop of wine is enough to redden a whole glass of water.

What happened between those two beings? Nothing. They were adoring one another.

There is something more terrible than a hell of suffering--a hell of boredom.

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.

For there are many great deeds done in the small struggles of life.

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.

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.

Superstitions, bigotries, hypocrisies, prejudices, these phantoms, phantoms though they be, cling to life; they have teeth and nails in their shadowy substance, and we must grapple with them individually and make war on them without truce; for it is one of humanity's inevitabilities to be condemned to eternal struggle with phantoms.

The hatred of luxury is not an intelligent hatred. It implies a hatred of arts.

He would give all of his clothes to his servant, admonishing him NOT to return them until he had completed his day's work.

War can only be qualified by its object, and there is neither foreign war nor civil war, there is only just or unjust war.

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.

Give to a being the useless, and deprive him of the needful, and you have the gamin.

Every bird which flies has the thread of the infinite in its claw.

Nothing is more imminent than the impossible . . . what we must always foresee is the unforeseen.

A one-eyed man is much more incomplete than a blind man, for he knows what it is that's lacking.

Great griefs exhaust. They discourage us with life. The man into whom they enter feels something taken from him. In youth, their visit is sad; later on, it is ominous.

Human intelligence discovered a way of perpetuating itself, one not only more durable and more resistant than architecture, but also simpler and easier. Architecture was dethroned. The stone letters of Orpheus gave way to the lead letters of Gutenburg. The book will kill the edifice.

She might have melted a heart of stone, but nothing can melt a heart of wood.

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.

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.

At that moment of love, a moment when passion is absolutely silent under omnipotence of ecstasy, Marius, pure seraphic Marius, would have been more capable of visiting a woman of the streets than of raising Cosette’s dress above the ankle. Once on a moonlit night, Cosette stopped to pick up something from the ground, her dress loosened and revealed the swelling of her breasts. Marius averted his eyes.

And if it happened to be a Christmas-night when the great bell seemed to rattle in its throat as it called the faithful to the midnight mass, there was such an indescribable air of life spread over the sombre facade that the great door-way looked as if it were swallowing the entire crowd, and the rose-window staring at them.

You preserve your shame but you kill your glory.

The guillotine is the ultimate expression of Law, and its name is vengeance; it is not neutral, nor does it allow us to remain neutral.

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.

Nobody knows like a woman how to say things at the same time sweet and profound. Sweetness and depth, this is all of woman; this is all of Heaven.

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.

What I feel for you seems less of earth and more of a cloudless heaven.

The eye of a man should be still more reverent before the rising of a young maiden than before the rising of a star. The possibility of touch should increase respect. The down of the peach, the dust of the plum, the radiated crystal of snow, the butterfly’s wing powdered with feathers, are gross things beside that chastity that does not even know it is chaste. The young maiden is only the glimmer of a dream and is not yet statue. Her alcove is hidden in the shadows of the ideal. The indiscreet touch of the eye desecrates this dim penumbra. Here, to gaze, is to profane.

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.

...But listen, there will be more joy in heaven over the tears of a repentant sinner than over the white robes of a hundred just men.

Of all the things that God has made, the human heart is the one which sheds the most light, alas! and the most darkness.

To be wicked does not insure prosperity - for the inn did not succeed well.

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.

True or false, that which is said of men often occupies as important a place in their lives, and above all in their destinies, as that which they do.

It is those books which a man possesses but does not read which constitute the most suspicious evidence against him.

In winter there is no heat, no light, no noon, evening touches morning, there is fog, and mist, the window is frosted, and you cannot see clearly. The sky is but the mouth of a cave. The whole day is the cave.... Frightful season! Winter changes into stone the water of heaven and the heart of man.

Let us leave to the brain what belongs to it, and agree that the work of the men of genius is of the superhuman, the offspring of man.

Everything bows to success, even grammar.

He had slipped, climbed, rolled, searched, walked, persevered, that is all. Such is the secret of all triumphs.

A shadow is hard to seize by the throat and dash to the ground.

All the human and animal manure which the world wastes, if returned to the land, instead of being thrown into the sea, would suffice to nourish the world.

Astronomy, that micography of heaven, is the most magnificent of the sciences. ... Astronomy has its clear side and its luminous side; on its clear side it is tinctured with algebra, on its luminous side with poetry.

The jostling of young minds against each other has this wonderful attribute, that one can never foresee the spark, nor predict the flash. What will spring up in a moment? Nobody knows.

Babylon violated diminishes Alexander; Rome enslaved diminishes Caesar; massacred Jerusalem diminishes Titus. Tyranny follows the tyrant. Woe to the man who leaves behind a shadow that bears his form.

At least you are mine! Soon – in a few months, perhaps, my angel will sleep in my arms, will awaken in my arms, will live there. All your thought at all moments, all your looks will be for me; all my thought, all my moments, all my looks will be for you!

Great blunders are often made, like large ropes, of a multitude of fibres.

Those who every morning plan the transactions of the day and follow out that plan carry a thread that will guide them through the labyrinth of the most busy life. The orderly arrangement of their time is like a ray of light which darts itself through all their occupations. But where no plan is laid, where the disposal of time is surrendered merely to the chance of incidents, chaos will soon reign.

Nothing can be more depressing than to expose, naked to the light of thought, the hideous growth of argot. Indeed it is like a sort of repellent animal intended to dwell in darkness which has been dragged out of its cloaca. One seems to see a horned and living creature viciously struggling to be restored to the place where it belongs. One word is like a claw, another like a sightless and bleeding eye; and there are phrases which clutch like the pincers of a crab. And all of it is alive with the hideous vitality of things that have organized themselves amid disorganization.

Ma vie est une énigme dont ton nom est le mot. (My life is an enigma, of which your name is the word.)

My greatness does not extend to this shelf.