Quotes from Victor Hugo

To love is to act.

On ne lit pas impunément des niaiseries

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.

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.

Ye who suffer because ye love, love yet more. To die of love, is to live in it.

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

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.

We live in the midst of a gloomy society. Success; that is the lesson which falls drop by drop from the slope of corruption. Be it said in passing, that success is a very hideous thing. Its false resemblance to merit deceives men. For the masses, success has almost the same profile as supremacy. Success, that Menaechmus of talent, has one dupe,--history.

Great edifices, like great mountains, are the work of the ages.

The wicked envy and hate; it is their way of admiring.

We are in the hands of those gods, those monsters, those giants: our thoughts.

Not ill? No truly, I am young, healthful, and strong; the blood flows freely in my veins; my limbs obey my will; I am robust in mind and body, constituted for a long life. Yes, all this is true; and yet, nevertheless, I have an illness, a fatal illness,--an illness given by the hand of man!

Ma bouche n'avait pas dit une chose que deja ton coeur avait repondu.

Suffering engenders passion; and while the prosperous blind themselves, or go to sleep, the hatred of the unfortunate classes kindles its torch at some sullen or ill-constituted mind, which is dreaming in a corner, and sets to work to examine society. The examination of hatred is a terrible thing.

He was at his own request and through his own complicity driven out of all his happinesses one after the other; and he had this sorrow, that after having lost Cosette wholly in one day, he was afterwards obliged to lose her again in detail.

He was not his father, and this was not his work; but he was the master, and this was his masterpiece.

Paris, viewed from the towers of Notre Dame in the cool dawn of a summer morning, is a delectable and a magnificent sight; and the Paris of that period must have been eminently so.

These are dark radiances. They have no suspicion that they are to be pitied. Certainly they are so. He who does not weep does not see. They are to be admired and pitied, as one would both pity and admire a being at once night and day, without eyes beneath his lashes but with a star on his brow.

The supreme happiness of life is the conviction of being loved for yourself or more correctly being loved in spite of yourself.

The boughs, without becoming detached from the trunk grow away from it.

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

To have lied is to have suffered.

Not seeing people allows you to think of them as perfect in all kinds of ways.

Freedom begins where it ends ignorance