Quotes from Victor Hugo

As we have said, robust souls are sometimes almost, but not entirely, overthrown by strokes of misfortune....Despair has steps leading upward. From total depression we rise to despondency, from despondency to affliction, from affliction to melancholy. Melancholy is a twilight state in which suffering transmutes into a somber joy....Melancholy is the enjoyment of being sad.

In all his trials he felt encouraged and sometimes even upbourne by a secret force within. The soul helps the body, and at certain moments uplifts it. It is the only bird which sustains its cage.

Release is not the same as liberation. You get out of jail, all right, but you never stop being condemned.

Se quereis saber o que é a revolução, chamai-lhe Progresso, se quereis saber o que é o progresso, chamai-lhe Amanhã

If there is anything more poignant than a body agonizing for want of bread, it is a soul dying for hunger of light.

Civil war? What does that mean? Is there any foreign war? Isn't every war fought between men, between brothers?

Let us never fear robbers nor murderers. Those are dangers from without, petty dangers. Let us fear ourselves. Prejudices are the real robbers; vices are the real murderers. The great dangers lie within ourselves. What matters is what threatens our head or our purse! Let us think only of that which threatens our soul.

La dicha que habría podido encontrar en la tierra si ella no hubiera sido gitana ni él sacerdote; si Febo no hubiera existido y si ella lo hubiera amado.

No one could have told: all that was known was, that when he returned from Italy he was a priest.

People who are overwhelmed with troubles never do look back. They know only too well that misfortune follows in their footsteps.

Love is the only ecstasy, everything else weeps.

The misery of a child is interesting to a mother, the misery of a young man is interesting to a young woman, the misery of an old man is interesting to nobody. This of all miseries is the coldest.

Liberation is not deliverance. One gets free from the galleys, but not from the sentence. That

A flower should smell sweet, and a woman should have wit.

Ordinarily it ends in that ocean: revolution. Sometimes, however, coming from those lofty mountains which dominate the moral horizon, justice, wisdom, reason, right, formed of the pure snow of the ideal, after a long fall from rock to rock, after having reflected the sky in its transparency and increased by a hundred affluents in the majestic mien of triumph, insurrection is suddenly lost in some quagmire, as the Rhine is in a swamp.

And these things took place, and the kings resumed their thrones, and the master of Europe was put in a cage, and the old régime became the new régime, and all the shadows and all the light of the earth changed place, because, on the afternoon of a certain summer's day, a shepherd said to a Prussian in the forest, "Go this way, and not that!

Love is a fault; so be it. Fantine was innocence floating high over fault.

imala je hladno srce. Nije to bila njena krivnja, nije joj nedostajalao sposobnosti da voli; jao! nedostajala joj je mogu?nost.

Night sometimes lends such tragic assistance to catastrophe.

Aie dans les veines le doux lait de ta mère, et le généreux esprit de ton père ; sois bon, sois fort, sois honnête, sois juste ! Et reçois, dans le baiser de ta grand-mère, la bénédiction de ton grand-père.

He said to himself that he really had not suffered enough to deserve such radiant happiness, and he thanked God, in the depths of his soul, for having permitted that he, a miserable man, should be so loved by this innocent being. He said to himself that he really had not suffered enough to deserve such radiant happiness, and he thanked God, in the depths of his soul, for having permitted that he, a miserable man, should be so loved by this innocent being. -Jean Valjean about Cossette-

Au-dessus de l'absolu révolutionnaire, il y a l'absolu humain.

Probity, sincerity, candor, conviction, the sense of duty, are things which may become hideous when wrongly directed; but which, even when hideous, remain grand: their majesty, the majesty peculiar to the human conscience, clings to them in the midst of horror; they are virtues which have one vice,—error.

The best minds have their soft spots and sometimes feel somewhat bruised by the scant respect of logic.