Quotes from Victor Hugo

The episcopal palace of D—— adjoins the hospital.

à des résultats magnifiques par des voies étroites

It must be remembered that at that epoch the police was not precisely at its ease; the free press embarrassed it; several arbitrary arrests denounced by the newspapers, had echoed even as far as the Chambers, and had rendered the Prefecture timid. Interference with individual liberty was a grave matter. The police agents were afraid of making a mistake; the prefect laid the blame on them; a mistake meant dismissal.

Prosperity argues capacity. Win in the lottery, and behold! you are a clever man. He who triumphs is venerated. Be born with a silver spoon in your mouth! everything lies in that. Be lucky, and you will have all the rest; be happy, and people will think you great. Outside of five or six immense exceptions, which compose the splendor of a century, contemporary admiration is nothing but short-sightedness.

Oh, love! That is to be two, and yet one. A man and a woman joined, as into an angel; that is heaven!

God can add nothing to the happiness of those who love, except to give them endless duration. After a life of love, an eternity of love is, in fact, an augmentation; but to increase in intensity even the ineffable felicity which love bestows on the soul even in this world, is impossible, even to God. God is the plenitude of heaven; love is the plenitude of man.

Teach those who are ignorant as many things as possible; society is culpable, in that it does not afford instruction gratis; it is responsible for the night which it produces. This soul is full of shadow; sin is therein committed. The guilty one is not the person who has committed the sin, but the person who has created the shadow.

To place the infinity here below in contact, by the medium of thought, with the infinity on high, is called praying.

Oh, you who are! Ecclesiastes calls you the All-powerful; the Maccabees call you the Creator; the Epistle to the Ephesians calls you liberty; Baruch calls you Immensity; the Psalms call you Wisdom and Truth; John calls you Light; the Books of Kings call you Lord; Exodus calls you Providence; Leviticus, Sanctity; Esdras, Justice; the creation calls you God; man calls you Father; but Solomon calls you Compassion, and that is the most beautiful of all your names.

The poor man shuddered inside, flooded with an angelic bliss; he told himself in a burst of joy that this would last all his life; he

With love there is no middle course: it destroys, or else it saves. All human destiny is contained in that dilemma, the choice between destruction and salvation, which is nowhere more implacably posed than in love. Love is life, or it is death. It is the cradle, but also the coffin. One and the same impulse moves the human heart to say yes or no. Of all things God has created it is the human heart that sheds the brightest light, and, alas, the blackest despair.

Duša se ne predaje o?aju pre nego iscrpe sve obmane

Madame Victurnien sometimes saw her passing, from her window, noticed the distress of that creature who, thanks to her, had been put back in her proper place, and congratulated herself. The happiness of the evil-minded is black.

What is more melancholy and more profound than to see a thousand objects for the first and the last time? To travel is to be born and to die at every instant;

Pretty, but badly dressed, breath of an oracle which had passed by her and vanished after depositing in her heart one of the two germs which must afterwards fill the whole life of the woman, coquetry. Love is the other.

Cossette, al saber que era hermosa, perdió la gracia de ignorarlo; gracia exquisita, porque la belleza realzada por la sencillez es inefable, y no hay nada más digno de adoración que una inocencia deslumbradora que lleva en la mano, sin saberlo, la llave de un paraíso.

People who are crushed do not look behind them. They know but too well the evil fate which follows them.

the goodness of the mother is written in the gayety of the child;

The wolf had been trained by the man, or had trained himself unassisted, to divers wolfish arts, which swelled the receipts. Above all things, do not degenerate into a man, his friend would say to him. Never did the wolf bite: the man did now and then. At least, to bite was the intent of Ursus. He was a misanthrope, and to italicize his misanthropy he had made himself a juggler. To live, also; for the stomach has to be consulted.

God's whole policy consists in rendering slopes less steep.

Misery, we repeat, had been good for him. Poverty in youth, when it succeeds, has this magnificent property about it, that it turns the whole will towards effort, and the whole soul towards aspiration.

The faults of women, of children, of the feeble, the indigent, and the ignorant, are the fault of the husbands, the fathers, the masters, the strong, the rich, and the wise.

Jean Valjean, who was listening attentively, heard something like the sould of retreating footsteps. They are going away, he thought. I am alone. All at once he heard over his head a noise which appeared to him like a thunder-clap; it was a spadeful of earth falling on the coffin; a second spadeful fell, and one of the holes by which he breather was stopped; a third spadeful fell, and then a forth. There are somethings stronger than the the strongest man, and Jean Val Jean lost his senses.

In the morning, when he entered my room, I grumbled, but he was like the sunlight to me, all the same. One cannot defend oneself against those brats. They take hold of you, they hold you fast, they never let you go again. The truth is, that there never was a cupid like that child.