Victor Hugo

“Have no fear of robbers or murderers. They are external dangers, petty dangers. We should fear ourselves. Prejudices are the real robbers; vices the real murderers. The great dangers are within us. Why worry about what threatens our heads or our purses? Let us think instead of what threatens our souls.”

“Citizens, in the future there will be neither darkness nor thunderbolts; neither ferocious ignorance, nor bloody retaliation. As there will be no more Satan, there will be no more Michael. In the future no one will kill any one else, the earth will beam with radiance, the human race will love. The day will come, citizens, when all will be concord, harmony, light, joy and life; it will come, and it is in order that it may come that we are about to die.”

“More powerful than the mighty armies is an idea whose time has come.”

“Forty is the old age of youth; fifty is the youth of old age.”

“When we reach out to pluck a flower the stem trembles, seeming both to shrink and to offer itself. The human body has something of this tremor at the moment when the mysterious hand of death reaches out to pluck a soul.”

“Curiosity is gluttony. To see is to devour.”

“A soul for a piece of bread. Misery makes the offer; society accepts.”

“We may be indifferent to the death penalty and not declare ourselves either way so long as we have not seen a guillotine with our own eyes. But when we do, the shock is violent, and we are compelled to choose sides, for or against... Death belongs to God alone.”

“It was all over with him. Marius loved a woman. His destiny was entering upon the unknown. ”

“Children at once accept joy and happiness with quick familiarity, being themselves naturally all happiness and joy. ”

“Protect the workers, encourage the rich.”

“An army is a strange contrivance in which power is the sum of a vast total of impotence.”

“It is grievous for a man to leave behind him a shadow in his own shape.”

“She might have melted a heart of stone, but nothing can melt a heart of wood.”

“The utmost extremity of degradation is the obscene merriment to which it gives rise.”

“His judgement demonstrates that one can be a genius and understand nothing of an art that is not one's own.”

“It may be remarked in passing that success is an ugly thing. Men are deceived by its false resemblances to merit. To the crowd, success wears almost the features of true mastery, and the greatest dupe of this counterfeit talent is History.”

“I have been loving you a little more every minute since this morning.”

“Il possédait comme tout le monde sa terminaison en "iste", sans laquelle personne n'aurait pu vivre en ce temps-là, mais il n'était ni royaliste, ni bonapartiste, ni chartiste, ni orléaniste, ni anarchiste; il était bouquiniste.”

“Being good is easy, what is difficult is being just.”

“Demain, dès l'aube, à l'heure où blanchit la campagne,Je partirai. Vois-tu, je sais que tu m'attends.J'irai par la forêt, j'irai par la montagne.Je ne puis demeurer loin de toi plus longtemps.Je marcherai les yeux fixés sur mes pensées,Sans rien voir au dehors, sans entendre aucun bruit,Seul, inconnu, le dos courbé, les mains croisées,Triste, et le jour pour moi sera comme la nuit.Je ne regarderai ni l'or du soir qui tombe,Ni les voiles au loin descendant vers Harfleur,Et quand j'arriverai, je mettrai sur ta tombeUn bouquet de houx vert et de bruyère en fleur.”

“He believed that faith gives health. He sought to counsel and calm the despairing by pointing out the Man of Resignation, and to transform the grief that contemplates the grave by showing it the grief that looks up to the stars.”

“I didn't believe it could be so monstrous. It's wrong to be so absorbed in divine law as not to perceive human law. Death belongs to God alone. By what right do men tough that unknown thing?”

“The transept belfry and the two towers were to him three great cages, the birds in which, taught by him, would sing for him alone. Yet it was these same bells which had made him deaf; but mothers are often fondest of the child who has made them suffer most.”

“La suprema dicha de la vida, es la convicción de que se es amado; amado por sí mismo, digamos mejor, ama¬do a pesar de sí mismo.”

“He left her. She was dissatisfied with him. He had preferred to incur her anger rather than cause her pain. He had kept all the pain for himself.”

“Oh! Everything I loved!”

“Better than the tread of mighty armies is an idea whose time has come.”

“He therefore turned to mankind only with regret. His cathedral was enough for him. It was peopled with marble figures of kings, saints and bishops who at least did not laugh in his face and looked at him with only tranquillity and benevolence. The other statues, those of monsters and demons, had no hatred for him – he resembled them too closely for that. It was rather the rest of mankind that they jeered at. The saints were his friends and blessed him; the monsters were his friends and kept watch over him. He would sometimes spend whole hours crouched before one of the statues in solitary conversation with it. If anyone came upon him then he would run away like a lover surprised during a serenade.”

“The beginning as well as the end of all his thoughts was hatred of human law, that hatred which, if it be not checked in its growth by some providential event, becomes, in a certain time, hatred of society, then hatred of the human race, and then hatred of creation, and reveals itself by a vague and incessant desire to injure some living being, it matters not who.”

“L’amour est une mer dont le femme est la rive.”

“What makes night within us may leave stars.”

“The beautiful has but one type, the ugly has a thousand. The fact is that the beautiful, humanly speaking, is merely form considered in its simplest aspect, in its most perfect symmetry, in its most entire harmony with our make-up. Thus the ensemble that it offers us is always complete, but restricted like ourselves. What we call the ugly, on the contrary, is a detail of a great whole which eludes us, and which is in harmony, not with man but with all creation. That is why it constantly presents itself to us in new but incomplete aspects...”

“Chantez, riez; soyez heureux, soyes célèbres;Chacun de vous sers bientôt dans les ténèbres. Sing, laugh; be happy, be famous;Each one of you will soon be in the darkness.”

“The mind's eye can nowhere find anything more dazzling or more dark than in man; it can fix itself upon nothing which is more awful, more complex, more mysterious, or more infinite. There is one spectacle grander than the sea, that is the sky; there is one spectacle grander than the sky, that is the interior of the soul.”

“History has its truth, and so has legend. Legendary truth is of another nature than historical truth. Legendary truth is invention whose result is reality. Furthermore, history and legend have the same goal; to depict eternal man beneath momentary man.”

“Does there exist an Infinity outside ourselves? Is that infinity One, immanent and permanent, necessarily having substance, since He is infinite and if He lacked matter He would be limited, necessarily possessing intelligence since He is infinite and, lacking intelligence, He would be in that sense finite. Does this Infinity inspire in us the idea of essense, while to ourselves we can only attribute the idea of existence? In order words, is He not the whole of which we are but the part?”

“Respirer Paris, cela conserve l'âme.”

“Whether true or false, what is said about men often has as much influence on their lives, and particularly on their destinies, as what they do.”

“An opulent priest is a contradiction.”

“C'est une étrange prétention des hommes de vouloir que l'amour conduise quelque part”

“there is a point, moreover, at which the unfortunate and the infamous are associated and confounded in a single word, Les Miserables; whose fault is it? And then, is it not when the fall is lowest that charity ought to be greatest?”

“According to an eastern fable, the rose was white when God created it, but when, as it unfolded, it felt Adam's eyes upon it, it blushed in modesty and turned pink.”

“We all know the artfulness with which a dropped coin hides itself, and the job we have to find it again. There are thoughts which play the same trick on us, rolling into a buried corner of our minds; and there it is, they've gone forever, we can't put our finger on them.”

“Dost thou understand? I love thee!" he cried again. "What love!" said the unhappy girl with a shudder. He resumed,--"The love of a damned soul. a”

“He who every morning plans the transactions of that day and follows that plan carries a thread that will guide him through the labyrinth of the most busy life.”

“What a transfiguration it is to love! And the little shrieks, the pursuits in the grass, the waists encircled by stealth, the jargon that is melody, the adoration that breaks through in the way a syllable is said, those cherries snatched form one pair of lips by another - It all catches fire and turns into celestial glories.”

“Do not ask the name of the person who asks you for a bed for a night. He whose name is a burden to him needs shelter more than any one.”

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

“We may remain more or less open-minded on the subject of the death penalty, indisposed to commit ourselves, so long as we have not seen a guillotine with our own eyes.”