A Quote by Victor Hugo

Sacrificing the earth for paradise is giving up the substance for the shadow.

Victor Hugo

Quote Topics

Earth Giving Giving Up Paradise Shadow Substance Up

Quote Author

Victor Hugo
French - Novelist
February 26, 1802 - May 22, 1885

I thought the most beautiful thing in the world must be shadow, the million moving shapes and cul-de-sacs of shadow. There was shadow in bureau drawers and closets and suitcases, and shadow under houses and trees and stones, and shadow at the back of people's eyes and smiles, and shadow, miles and miles and miles of it, on the night side of the earth.

Sylvia Plath

Dreams, indeed, are ambition; for the very substance of the ambitious is merely the shadow of a dream. And I hold ambition of so airy and light a quality that it is but a shadow's shadow.

William Shakespeare

Santa Barbara is a paradise; Disneyland is a paradise; the U.S. is a paradise. Paradise is just paradise. Mournful, monotonous, and superficial though it may be, it is paradise. There is no other.

Jean Baudrillard

By aiming for paradise, we lose sight of earth. Hope of a beyond and aspiration to an afterlife engender a sense of futility in the present. If the prospect of getting taken up to paradise generates joy, it is the mindless joy of a baby picked up from his crib.

Michel Onfray

The earth is not a lair, neither is it a prison. The earth is a Paradise, the only one we'll ever know. We will realize it the moment we open our eyes. We don't have to make it a Paradise-it is one. We have only to make ourselves fit to inhabit it. The man with the gun, the man with murder in his heart, cannot possibly recognize Paradise even when he is shown it.

Henry Miller

As long as politics is the shadow cast on society by big business, the attenuation of the shadow will not change the substance.

John Dewey

Pain may be said to follow pleasure as its shadow; but the misfortune is that in this particular case, the substance belongs to the shadow, the emptiness to its cause.

Charles Caleb Colton

A few moments before the sun sets, the dark Earth shadow begins to rise in the east... It is nothing less than the shadow of the entire Earth, cast upward onto the atmosphere itself... I saw it over the great plains, and I felt as if I could sense the Earth pivoting silently under my feet.

James Elkins

The Church says that the Earth is flat, but I know that it is round. For I have seen the shadow of the Earth on the moon, and I have more faith in the shadow than in the Church.

Ferdinand Magellan

Evil (ignorance) is like a shadow-- it has no real substance of its own, it is simply a lack of light. You cannot cause a shadow to disappear by trying to fight it, stamp on it, by railing against it, or any other form of emotional or physical resistance. In order to cause a shadow to disappear, you must shine light on it

Shakti Gawain

At the end of the day, anything I think I'm sacrificing I'm just giving up because it makes me feel better.

Robert Downey, Jr.

The love of wilderness is more than a hunger for what is always beyong reach; it is also an expression of loyalty to the earth, the earth which bore us and sustains us, the only paradise we shall ever know, the only paradise we ever need, if only we had the eyes to see.

Edward Abbey

Contentment is the greatest door that one enters to Allah, it is the source of tranquility for the worshiper and paradise on earth. Whoever does not enter it will not enter the Paradise in the Hereafter.