Victor Hugo Quotes

To love or have loved, that is enough. Ask nothing further, There is no other pearl to be found in the dark folds of life.

A library implies an act of faith which generations, still in darkness hid, sign in their night in witness of the

As long as ignorance and misery exist in the world, books like the one you are about to read are, perhaps, not entirely useless

In love there are no friends everywhere where there is a pretty woman hostility is open.

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

Release is not the same as liberation. You get out of jail, all right, but you never stop being condemned.

Certainly, I approve of political opinions, but there are people who do not know where to stop.

The senator...was a smart man who had made his way in life with a single-mindedness oblivious to any of those stumbling blocks known as conscience, sworn oaths, justice, duty...

Style is the shape the ideal takes, rhythm, its movement.

The best minds have their soft spots and sometimes feel somewhat bruised by the scant respect of logic.

A man is not idle because he is absorbed in thought. There is visible labor and there is invisible labor.

Phoebus de Chateaupers likewise came to a 'tragic end': he married.

A man may beg, but a woman has to sell.

Mother's arms are made of tenderness, and sweet sleep blesses the child who lies within.

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

The sins of women and children, domestic servants and the weak, the poor and the ignorant, are the sins of the husbands and fathers, the masters, the strong and the rich and the educated.

Yes, the brutalities of progress are called revolutions. When they are done, we recognize one thing: that the human race has been badly manhandled, but that it has moved forward.

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

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.

Make thought a whirlwind.

Who has been unhooking the stars without my permission, and putting them on the table in the guise of candles?

Death belongs only to God. What right have men to lay hands on a thing so unknown?

The judge speaks in the name of justice, ' he said. 'The priest speaks in the name of pity, which is only a higher form of justice.' (Bishop Myriel)

When you shall have learned to know, and to love, you will still suffer. The day is born in tears. The luminous weep, if only over those in darkness.

This is the shade of difference: the door of the physician should never be shut, the door of the priest should always be open.

What is more melancholy and more profound than to see a thousand objects for the first and the last time? To travel is to be born and to die at every instant...

Oh! if the good hearts had the fat purses, how much better everything would go!

It is a mournful task to break the sombre attachments of the past.

As for us, we respect the past here and there, and we spare it, above all, provided that it consents to be dead. If it insists on being alive, we attack it, and we try to kill it.

The soul that loves and suffers is in the sublime state.

He had the confidence of a man who had never been wounded.

Monsieur Bienvenu was simply a man who accepted these mysterious questions...and who had in his soul a deep respect for the mystery which enveloped them.

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?

She had spears of straw and grass in her hair, not like Ophelia gone mad through contact with Hamlet's madness, but because she had slept in some stable loft.

He had to accept the fate of every newcomer to a small town where there are plenty of tongues that gossip and few minds that think.

Argot is both a literary and a social phenomenon. What is argot, properly speaking? Argot is the language of misery.

Let us reflect, if we wish to be brilliant. Too much improvisation empties the mind in a stupid way. Running beer gathers no froth. No haste, gentlemen.

The goodness of the mother is written in the gaiety of the child.

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

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

First of all, I wish you love, and that by loving you may also be loved.But if it’s not like that, be brief in forgettingAnd after you’ve forgotten, don’t keep anything.

The soul of the just contemplates in sleep a mysterious heaven.

. . . for men felt therein the presence of that great human thing which is called law, and that great divine thing which is called justice.

Because things are not agreeable, " said Jean Valjean, "that is no reason for being unjust towards God.

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.

Hope is the Word which God has written on the brow of every man.

To love and be loved, that is the miracle of youth

Tall and thin, Mademoiselle Baptistine was a pale and gentle person. She was the incarnation of the word 'respectable, ' whereas to be 'venerable, ' a woman should lso be a mother.

Let us show that, if the people abandon the republicans, the republicans do not abandon the people.

What a grand thing it is to be loved! What a far grander thing it is to love! The heart becomes heroic, by dint of passion.