Quotes from Victor Hugo

They fathomed principle; they attached themselves to right. They longed for the absolute, they caught glimpses of the infinite realisations; the absolute, by its very rigidity, pushes the mind towards the boundless, makes it float in the illimitable. There is nothing like dream to create the future. Utopia today, flesh and blood tomorrow.

The greatest happiness in life is the conviction that we are loved; loved for ourselves, or moreover, loved in spite of ourselves.

I tell you, monsieur, it's the end of the world. The students' behaviour has never been so outrageous. It's all these damnable modern inventions that are the ruin of everything.

The soul does not give up to despair until it has exhausted all illusions.

In the morning I write love letters and in the afternoon I dig graves

At the end of life death is a departure; but at life's beginning a departure is death.

Sin is a gravitation.

It is necessary that society should look at these things, because it is itself which creates them.

Confiar es a veces abandonar.

Why, there's the air, the sky, the morning, the evening, moonlight, my friends, women, the beautiful architecture of Paris to study, three big books to write and all sorts of other things. Anaxagoras used to say that he was in the world in order to admire the sun. And then I have the good fortune to be able to spend my days from morning to night in the company of a man of genius - myself - and it's very pleasant.

It is only barbarous nations who have a sudden growth after a victory

The Convention promulgated this great axiom: The liberty of one citizen ends where the liberty of another citizen begins, which comprises in two lines the entire law of human society.

The power of a glance has been so much abused in love stories that it has come to be disbelieved. Few people dare say nowadays that two beings have fallen in love because they have looked at each other. Yet that is the way love begins, and only that way. The rest is only the rest, and comes afterwards. Nothing is more real than the great shocks that two souls give each other in exchanging this spark.

Es que tiene en el alma una perla, la inocencia; y las perlas no se disuelven en el fango. [...] Se revuelca en estiércol y sale de él recubierto de estrellas.

two principal problems. First problem: To produce wealth. Second problem: To distribute it.... England solves the first of these two problems. She creates wealth wonderfully; she distributes it badly.... [she has] a grandeur ill constituted, in which all the material elements are combined, and into which no moral element enters. Communism think they have solved the second problem. They are mistaken. They destroy production...

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

Hay siempre en el pensamiento cierta cantidad de rebelión interior, y le irritaba sentirla dentro de sí.

Let misery hide itself in silence, otherwise it becomes treason.

Rien n'est tel que le dogme pour enfanter le rêve. Et rien n'est tel que le rêve pour engendrer l'avenir. Utopie aujourd'hui, chair et os demain.

Catastrophes have a somber way of arranging things.

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

Sire, said M. Myriel, you are looking at a good man, and I at a great man. Each of us can profit by it.

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.

Bonapartist democrat. Grey shades of a quiet mouse colour.