Quotes from Victor Hugo

Life is a theatre set in which there are but few practicable entrances.

God knows better than we do what we need.

The realities of life do not allow themselves to be forgotten.

He reached for his pocket, and found there, only reality

God will reward you,' he said. 'You must be an angel since you care for flowers.

This first glance of a soul which does not yet know itself is like dawn in the heavens; it is the awakening of something radiant and unknown.

Each man should frame life so that at some future hour fact and his dreaming meet.

Gentlemen of the human race, I say to hell with the lot of you.

Life is the flower for which love is the honey.

What happened between those two beings? Nothing. They were adoring one another.

Success is an ugly thing. Men are deceived by its false resemblances to merit.... They confound the brilliance of the firmament with the star-shaped footprints of a duck in the mud.

A man without a woman is like a pistol without a trigger; it is the woman who makes the man go off.

Sleep comes more easily than it returns.

Forget not, never forget that you have promised me to use this silver to become an honest man.... Jean Valjean, my brother: you belong no longer to evil, but to good. It is your soul that I am buying for you. I withdraw it from dark thoughts and from the spirit of perdition, and I give it to God!

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

It is from books that wise people derive consolation in the troubles of life.

She loved with so much passion as she loved with ignorance. She did not know whether it were good or evil, beneficent or dangerous, necessary or accidental, eternal or transitory, permitted or prohibited: she loved.

Mothers arms are made of tenderness, And sweet sleep blesses the child who lies therein.

Morality is truth in full bloom.

One can no more keep the mind from returning to an idea than the sea from returning to a shore. For a sailor, this is called the tide; in the case of the guilty it is called remorse. God stirs up the soul as well as the ocean.

There is a determined though unseen bravery that defends itself foot by foot in the darkness against the fatal invasions of necessity and dishonesty. Noble and mysterious triumphs that no eye sees, and no fame rewards, and no flourish of triumph salutes. Life, misfortunes, isolation, abandonment, poverty, are battlefields that have their heroes; obscure heroes, sometimes greater than the illustrious heroes.

The quantity of civilization is measured by the quality of imagination.

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.

Be happy without picking flaws.