Quotes from Victor Hugo

Brothers, he who dies here dies in the radiance of the future, and we are entering a tomb all flooded with the dawn.

Freedom in art, freedom in society, this is the double goal towards which all consistent and logical minds must strive.

Il dort. Quoique le sort fut pour lui bien étrange, Il vivait. Il mourut quand il n'eut plus son ange. La choise simplement d'elle-même arriva. Comme la nuit se fait lorsque le jour s'en va. He is asleep. Though his mettle was sorely tried, He lived, and when he lost his angel, died. It happened calmly, on its own. The way night comes when day is done.

There are, as we know, powerful and illustrious atheists. At bottom, led back to the truth by their very force, they are not absolutely sure that they are atheists; it is with them only a question of definition, and in any case, if they do not believe in God, being great minds, they prove God.

Revolutions spring not from accident, but from necessity. A revolution is a return from the factitious to the real. It takes place because it must.

The malicious have a dark happiness.

Gentlemen, my father always detested me because I could not understand mathematics. I understand only love and liberty.

where would the shout of love begin, if not from the summit of sacrifice?

The holy law of Jesus Christ governs our civilisation, but it does not yet permeate it.

This is the shade of meaning: the door of a physician should never be closed; the door of a priest should always be open.

Oh! Everything I loved!

I bear the dungeon within me; within me is winter, ice, and despair; I have darkness in my soul.

For love is like a tree; it grows of itself; it send its roots deep into our being, and often continues to grow green over a heart in ruins.

Winter changes into stone the water of heaven and the heart of man.

Remember this, my friends: there are no such things as bad plants or bad men. There are only bad cultivators.

Profound hearts, wise minds, take life as God makes it; it is a long trial, and unintelligible preparation for the unknown destiny.

There are plenty who regard a wall behind which something is happening as a very curious thing.

No army can stop an idea whose time has come

All the human and animal manure which the world wastes, if returned to the land, instead of being thrown into the sea, would suffice to nourish the world.

Her soul trembled on her lips like a drop of dew on a flower.

Success is a very hideous thing. Its false resemblance to merit deceives men.

Among all these passionate hearts and all these undoubting minds there was one skeptic. How did he happen to be there? From juxtaposition. The name of this skeptic was Grantaire, and he usually signed with this rebus: R. Grantaire was a man who took good care not to believe in anything.

His whole life was now summed up in two words: absolute uncertainty within an impenetrable fog.

To be a saint is the exception; to be a just person is the rule. Err, stumble, commit sin, but be one of the just.