Top 990 Quotes & Sayings by Victor Hugo - Page 15

Whenever we encounter the Infinite in man, however imperfectly understood, we treat it with respect. Whether in the synagogue, the mosque, the pagoda, or the wigwam, there is a hideous aspect which we execrate and a sublime aspect which we venerate. So great a subject for spiritual contemplation, such measureless dreaming - the echo of God on the human wall!

We are on the side of religion as opposed to religions, and we are among those who believe in the wretched inadequacy of sermons and the sublimity of prayer.

There are plenty who regard a wall behind which something is happening as a very curious thing.

But alas, if I have not maintained my victory, it is God's fault for not making man and the devil of equal strength.

I believe, sir, in all the progress. Air navigation is the result of the oceanic navigation: from water the human has to pass in the air. Everywhere where creation will be breathable to him, the human will penetrate into the creation. Our only limit is life.

God was bored by him.

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 girls chirped and chatted like uncaged warblers. They were delirious with joy... Intoxications of life’s morning! Enchanted years! The wing of a dragonfly trembles! Oh, reader, whoever you may be, do you have such memories? Have you walked in the underbrush, pushing aside branches for the charming head behind you? Have you slid laughing, down some slope wet with rain, with the woman you loved?

For, to make deserts, God, who rules mankind, Begins with kings, and ends the work by wind.

Every bird which flies has the thread of the infinite in its claw. Germination includes the hatching of a meteor and the tap of a swallow's bill breaking the egg, and it leads forward the birth of an earth-worm and the advent of Socrates.

It is the essence of truth that it is never excessive.... We must not resort to the flame where only light is required.

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!

The reduction of the universe to the compass of a single being, and the extension of a single being until it reaches God - that is love. Love is the salute of the angels to the stars. How sad is the heart when rendered sad by love! How great is the void created by the absence of the being who alone fills the world.

Upon the first goblet he read this inscription, monkey wine; upon the second, lion wine; upon the third, sheep wine; upon the fourth, swine wine. These four inscriptions expressed the four descending degrees of drunkenness: the first, that which enlivens; the second, that which irritates; the third, that which stupefies; finally the last, that which brutalizes.

The holy law of Jesus Christ governs our civilisation, but it does not yet permeate it.

Philosophy is the microscope of thought.

Mirrors, those revealers of the truth, are hated; that does not prevent them from being of use.

France lost a great novel last night.

Symmetry is ennui, and ennui is the very essence of grief and melancholy. Despair yawns.

You would have imagined her at one moment a maniac, at another a queen.

If he had had all Peru in his pocket, he would certainly have given it to this dancer; but Gringoire had not Peru in his pocket; and besides, America was not yet discovered. (p. 66)

There exists, at the bottom of all abasement and misfortune, a last extreme which rebels and joins battle with the forces of law and respectability in a desperate struggle, waged partly by cunning and partly by violence, at once sick and ferocious, in which it attacks the prevailing social order with the pin-pricks of vice and the hammer-blows of crime.

People generally will soon understand that writers should be judged, not according to rules and species, which are contrary to nature and art, but according to the immutable principles of the art of composition, and the special laws of their individual temperaments.

There is no supernatural, there is only nature. Nature alone exists and contains all. All is. There is the part of nature that we perceive, and the part of nature that we do not perceive. ... If you abandon these facts, beware; charlatans will light upon them, also the imbecile. There is no mean: science, or ignorance. If science does not want these facts, ignorance will take them up. You have refused to enlarge human intelligence, you augment human stupidity. When Laplace withdraws Cagliostro appears.

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

He had, they said, tasted in succession all the apples of the tree of knowledge, and, whether from hunger or disgust, had ended by tasting the forbidden fruit.

A thousand men enslaved fear one beast free.

When two mouths, made sacred by love, draw near to each other to create, it is impossible, that above that ineffable kiss there should not be a thrill in the immense mystery of the stars.

To be a saint is the exception; to be a just person is the rule. Err, stumble, commit sin, but be one of the just.

These Greek capitals, black with age, and quite deeply graven in the stone, with I know not what signs peculiar to Gothic calligraphy imprinted upon their forms and upon their attitudes, as though with the purpose of revealing that it had been a hand of the Middle Ages which had inscribed them there, and especially the fatal and melancholy meaning contained in them, struck the author deeply.

Thus, 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.

Phenomena intersect; to see but one is to see nothing.

It is only barbarous nations who have a sudden growth after a victory

O youth! thou often tearest thy wings against the thorns of voluptuousness.

Do you know what friendship is?' he asked. 'Yes,' replied the gypsy; 'it is to be brother and sister; two souls which touch without mingling, two fingers on one hand.' 'And love?' pursued Gringoire. 'Oh! love!' said she, and her voice trembled, and her eye beamed. 'That is to be two and to be but one. A man and a woman mingled into one angel. It is heaven.

The author creates a book and the people accept or not accept it. The creator of a book is an author and the creator of it`s fate are people.

We should judge a man much more surely from what he dreams than from what he thinks.

Is there not in every human soul a primitive spark, a divine element, incorruptible in this world and immortal in the next, which can be developed by goodness, kindled, lit up, and made to radiate, and which evil can never entirely extinguish.

Symmetry is tedious, and tedium is the very basis of mourning. Despair yawns.

Great blunders are often made, like large ropes, of a multitude of fibers. Take the cable thread by thread, take separately all the little determining motives, you break them one after another, and you say: that is all! Wind them and twist them together, they become an enormity.

Let us have compassion for those under chastisement. Alas, who are we ourselves? Who am I and who are you? Whence do we come and is it quite certain that we did nothing before we were born? This earth is not without some resemblance to a gaol. Who knows but that man is a victim of divine justice? Look closely at life. It is so constituted that one senses punishment everywhere.

My misfortune is that I still resemble a man too much. I should liked to be wholly a beast like that goat. - Quasimodo

A breath of Paris preserves the soul.

Without at all invalidating what we have just said, we believe that a perpetual remembrance of the tomb is proper for the living. On this point, the priest and the philosopher agree: We must die.

The soul in the darkness sins, but the real sinner is he who caused the darkness.

As for the bishop, the sight of the guillotine was a great shock to him, from which he recovered only slowly.

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.

The greatest products of architecture are less the works of individuals than of society; rather the offspring of a nation's effort, than the inspired flash of a man of genius.

Primitive times are lyrical, ancient times epical, modern times dramatic. The ode sings of eternity, the epic imparts solemnity tohistory, the drama depicts life. The characteristic of the first poetry is ingeniousness, of the second, simplicity, of the third, truth.

Thought is the work of the intellect, reverie is its self-indulgence. To substitute day-dreaming for thought is to confuse a poison with a source of nourishment.

I'm not in the world to guard my own life, but to guard souls

The word Gothic, in the sense in which it is generally employed, is wholly unsuitable, but wholly consecrated. Hence we accept it and we adopt it, like all the rest of the world, to characterize the architecture of the second half of the Middle Ages, where the ogive is the principle which succeeds the architecture of the first period, of which the semi-circle is the father.

To commit the least possible sin is the law for man. To live without sin is the dream of an angel. Everything terrestrial is subject to sin. Sin is a gravitation.

Love is a fault; so be it.

The peculiarity of sunrise is to make us laugh at all our terrors of the night, and our laugh is always proportioned to the fear we have had.

The supreme ordeal, let us say rather, the only ordeal, is the loss of the beloved being.

A republic may be called the climate of civilization.

Brothers, he who dies here dies in the radiance of the future, and we are entering a tomb all flooded with the dawn.

There is one spectacle grander than the sea, That is the sky.

Who then understands the reciprocal flux and reflux of the infinitely great and the infinitely small, the echoing of causes in the abysses of being, and the avalanches of creation?