Top 990 Quotes & Sayings by Victor Hugo - Page 14

A doctor’s door should never be closed, a priest's door should always be open.

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.

I repeat, whether we be Italians or Frenchmen, misery concerns us all.

It has become necessary to call the attention of European governments to a fact which is apparently so insignificant that the governments seem not to notice it. The fact is this: an entire people is being annihilated. Where? In Europe. Are there witnesses? One witness, the entire world. Do the governments see it? No.

That is the explanation of war, an outrage by humanity upon humanity in despite of humanity.

There is but one way of refusing To-morrow, that is to die.

Winter changes into stone the water of heaven and the heart of man.

Lastly, this threefold poetry flows from three great sources - The Bible, Homer, Shakespeare.... The Bible before the Iliad, the Iliad before Shakespeare.

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

Why worry about what threatens our heads or purses? Let us think instead of what threatens our souls.

And the dream that our mind had sketched in haste Shall others continue, but never complete. For none upon earth can achieve his scheme; The best as the worst are futile here: We wake at the self-same point of the dream, All is here begun, and finished elsewhere.

Who among us has not sought peace in a song?

Foppery is the egotism of clothes.

There is will in the thought, there is none in the dream. The dream, which is completely spontaneous, takes and keeps, even in the gigantic and the ideal, the form of our mind. Nothing springs more directly and more sincerely from the very bottom of our souls than our unreflected and indefinite aspirations towards the splendours of destiny.

We need those who pray constantly to compensate for those who do not pray at all.

...Man lives by affirmation even more than he does by bread.

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.

A phenomenon often seen. A sceptic adhering to a believer; that is as simple as the law of the complementary colours. What we lack attracts us. Nobody loves the light like the blind man.

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.

There is a material advancement; we desire it. There is, also, a moral grandeur; we hold fast to it.

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

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.

There are no weeds, and no worthless men. There are only bad farmers.

Heaven, on occasion, half opens its arms to us; and that is the great moment.

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.

When I speak to you about myself, I am speaking to you about yourself. How is it you don't see that?

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

Algebra applies to the clouds.

There is suffering in the light; in excess it burns. Flame is hostile to the wing. To burn and yet to fly, this is the miracle of genius.

Life is a flower of which love is honey.

People do not read stupidities with impunity.

Excitement is not enjoyment: in calmness lies true pleasure. The most precious wines are sipped, not bolted at a swallow.

All who suffer are full of hatred; all who live drag a remorse: the dead alone have broken their chains.

Nothing is really small; whoever is open to the deep penetration of nature knows this.

We are reassured almost as foolishly as we are alarmed; human nature is so constituted.

God made the water but men made the wine.

The wise man is he who knows when and how to stop

...there is a point when the unfortunate and the infamous are associated and confused in a word, a mortal word, les miserables

When, like an Emir of tyrannic power, Sirius appears, and on the horizon black Bids countless stars pursue their mighty track.

Success is a very hideous thing. Its false resemblance to merit deceives men.

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.

Civilization survives on the constant discovery of amity and an equal supply of damnation.

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.

Love, thine is the future. Death, I use thee, but I hate thee. Citizens, there shall be in the future neither darkness nor thunderbolts; neither ferocious ignorance nor blood for blood.

Since we shall love each other, I shall be great and you shall be rich.

Man does not understand nor accept immortality except on condition of self-remembrance.

The soul does not give itself up to despair until it has exhausted all illusions.

It is in the name of Moses that Bellarmin thunderstrikes Galileo; and this great vulgarizer of the great seeker Copernicus, Galileo, the old man of truth, the magian of the heavens, was reduced to repeating on his knees word for word after the inquisitor this formula of shame: "Corde sincera et fide non ficta abjuro maledico et detestor supradictos errores et hereses." Falsehood put an ass's hood on science.

A joyous little creature, so beautiful, It was as if a gate of Heaven opened as she came in.

What is the cat?" he exclaimed. "It is a corrective. God, having made the mouse, said, 'I've made a blunder.' And he made the cat. The cat is the erratum of the mouse. The mouse, plus the cat, Is the revised and corrected proof of creation.

The poetic element lying hidden in most women is the source of their magnetic attraction.

Waterloo is a battle of the first rank won by a captain of the second

She had had sweet dreams, which possibly arose from the fact that her little bed was very white.

Love is the salutation of the angel to the stars

While contemplating the bride, and eyeing the cake of soap, he muttered between his teeth: 'Tuesday. It was not Tuesday. Was it Tuesday? Perhaps it was Tuesday. Yes, it was Tuesday.' No one has ever discovered to what this monologue referred. Yes, perchance, this monologue had some connection with the last occasion on which he had dined, three days before, for it was now Friday.

The persistence of an all-absorbing idea is terrible.

Progress is the life-style of man.

There are things stronger than the strongest man.

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.

Nobody loves the light like the blind man.