Victor Hugo

“The crowd mistrusts the allurement of paladins. The masses, ponderous bodies that they are, and fragile on account of their very heaviness, fear adventure; and there is adventure in the ideal.”

“I exist," murmurs someone whose name is Everyone. "I'm young and in love; I am old and I want rest; I work, I prosper, I do good business, I have houses to rent, money in State Securities; I am happy, I have wife and children; I like all these things and I want to go on living, so leave me alone."... There are moments when all this casts a deep chill on the large-minded pioneers of the human race.”

“Youth is the future smiling at a stranger, which is itself.”

“Equality does not mean that all plants must grow to the same height - a society of tall grass and dwarf trees, a jostle of conflicting jealousies. It means, in civic terms, an equal outlet for all talents; in political terms, that all votes will carry the same weight; and in religious terms that all beliefs will enjoy equal rights.”

“A torch-flame resembles the wisdom of cowards: it gives a poor light because it trembles.”

“The reflection of a fact is in itself a fact.”

“He had not lived long enough to have discovered that nothing is more close at hand than the impossible, and what must be looked for is the unforeseen.”

“Civil war.... What did the words mean? Was there any such thing as "foreign war"? Was not all warfare between men warfare between brothers?”

“In principle any revolt strengthens the government it fails to overthrow.”

“Woe, alas, to those who have loved only bodies, forms, appearances! Death will rob them of everything. Try to love souls, you will find them again.”

“Revolutions are not born of chance but of necessity.”

“A creditor is worst than a master; for a master owns only your physical presence, whereas a creditor owns your dignity and may affront it.”

“The world is like Olympus - even a thief is accepted in it if he is also a god.”

“Daring is the price of progress. All splendid conquests are the prize of boldness, more or less.”

“You who are Prejudice, Abuse, Ignominy, Oppression, Iniquity, Despotism, Injustice, Fanaticism, beware of the wide-eyed urchin. He will grow up.”

“Misfortunes shared creates happiness.”

“A room where one merely goes to bed costs twenty sous but a room where one retires may cost twenty francs.”

“It does not do to let the senses fall asleep, whether in the shade of the sacred tree or in the shadow of an army.”

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

“To understand the nature of the Revolution we must call it "progress"; and we may define progress by the word "tomorrow".”

“Often the losing of a battle leads to the winning of progress. Less glory but greater liberty: the drum is silent and the voices of reason can be heard.”

“No Prefect of Police believes that a cat can turn into a lion; nevertheless the thing happens...”

“She worked in order to live, and presently fell in love, also in order to live, for the heart, too, has its hunger.”

“Win a lottery-prize and you are a cleaver man. Winners are adulated. To be born with a caul is everything; luck is what matters. Be fortunate and you will be thought great.”

“It's not enough to abolish abuse; custom must also be transformed. The mill was pulled down, but the wind still blows.”

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

“What a great thing, to be loved! What a greater thing still, to love! The heart becomes heroic though passion…if no one loved, the sun would go out.”

“When you get an idea into your head you find it in everything.”

“These two beings, who had loved each other so exclusively, and with so touching a love, and who had lived so long for each other, were now suffering beside one another and through one another; without speaking of it, without harsh feeling, and smiling all the while.”

“Les bras d'une mère sont faits de tendresse et un doux sommeil benit l'enfant qui s'y abandonne.”

“Et puis, tenez, monsieur Marius,je crois que j'étais un peu amoureuse de vous.”

“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.”

“Melancholy is the happiness of being sad.”

“Les livres sont des amis froids et sûrs.”

“His universal compassion was due less to natural instinct, than to a profound conviction, a sum of thoughts that in the course of living had filtered through to his heart: for in the nature of man, as in rock, there may be channels hollowed by the dropping of water, and these can never be destroyed.”

“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)”

“Want de liefde is als een boom, die vanzelf groeit, zijn wortels diep uit doet lopen in heel ons wezen en die blijft uitlopen ook als het hart verbrijzeld is.”

“They guillotined Charlotte Corday and they said Marat is dead. No, Marat is not dead. Put him in the Pantheon or throw him in the sewer; it doesn’t matter-he’s back the next day. He’s reborn in the man who has no job, the woman who has no bread, in the girl who has to sell her body, in the child who hasn’t learned to read; he’s reborn in the unheated tenement, in the wretched mattress without blankets, in the unemployed, in the proletariat, in the brothel, in the jailhouse, in your laws that show no pity, in your schools that give no future, and he appears in all that is ignorance and he recreates himself from all that is darkness. Oh, beware human society: you cannot kill Marat until you have killed the misery of poverty!”

“The soul has illusions as the bird has wings: it is supported by them.”

“Press on! A better fate awaits thee.”

“Almost all our desires, when examined, contain something too shameful to reveal.”

“The future has many names: For the weak, it means the unattainable. For the fearful, it means the unknown. For the courageous, it means opportunity.”

“Look down and show some mercy if you can. Look down, look down, upon your fellow man.”

“Large sums passed through his hands. Nevertheless, nothing changed his way of life or added the slightest luxury to his simple life. Quite the contrary, As there is always more misery at the lower end than humanity at the top, everything was given away before it was received, like water on parched soil. No matter how much money came to him, he never had enough. And then he robbed himself.”

“Admirable, however, as the Paris of the present day appears to you, build up and put together again in imagination the Paris of the fifteenth century; look at the light through that surprising host of steeples, towers, and belfries; pour forth amid the immense city, break against the points of its islands, compress within the arches of the bridges, the current of the Seine, with its large patches of green and yellow, more changeable than a serpent's skin; define clearly the Gothic profile of this old Paris upon an horizon of azure, make its contour float in a wintry fog which clings to its innumerable chimneys; drown it in deep night, and observe the extraordinary play of darkness and light in this sombre labyrinth of buildings; throw into it a ray of moonlight, which shall show its faint outline and cause the huge heads of the towers to stand forth from amid the mist; or revert to that dark picture, touch up with shade the thousand acute angles of the spires and gables, and make them stand out, more jagged than a shark's jaw, upon the copper-coloured sky of evening. Now compare the two.”

“In all Thénardier's outpourings, the words and gestures, the fury blazing in his eyes, this explosion of an evil nature brazenly exposed, the mixture of bravado and abjectness, arrogance, pettiness, rage, absurdity; the hodgepodge of genuine distress, and lying sentiment, the shamelessness of a vicious man rejoicing in viciousness, the bare crudity of an ugly soul -- in this eruption of all suffering and hatred there was something which was hideous as evil itself and still as poignant as truth.”

“A fall from such a height is rarely straight downwards.”

“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.”

“Though one believes in nothing, there are moments in life when one accepts the religion of the temple nearest at hand.”

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