Quotes from Victor Hugo

She took recourse to the expedient of constantly terrified children. She lied.

trivial,—there are no trivial facts in humanity, nor little leaves in vegetation,—are useful.

As long as ignorance and misery exist in the world, books like the one you are about to read are, perhaps, not entirely useless

there is always more wretchedness below than there is brotherhood above

The reduction of the universe to one single being, the expansion of one single being into God: That is what love is.

The cities make ferocious men because they make corrupt men. The mountain, the sea, the forest, make savage men; they develop the fierce side, but often without destroying the humane side.

And whatever he did, he always fell back onto this paradox at the core of his thought. To remain in paradise and become a demon! To re-enter hell and become an angel!

Esiste un modo di evitare che somiglia al cercare

Knowing that she was beautiful, she felt thoroughly, although in an indistinct way, that she had a weapon. Women play with their beauty as children do with their knives. They would themselves with it.

Oh ! l'amour ! dit-elle, et sa voix tremblait, et son oeil rayonnait. C'est être deux et n'être qu'un. Un homme et une femme qui se fondent en un ange. C'est le ciel.

To love someone is to make them transparent.

Old men need affection as they need the sun.

True or false, what is said about people often has as much bearing on their lives and especially on their destinies as what they do.

A certain amount of dreaming is good, like a narcotic in discreet doses. It lulls to sleep the fevers of the mind at labor, which are sometimes severe, and produces in the spirit a soft and fresh vapor which corrects the over-harsh contours of pure thought, fills in gaps here and there, binds together and rounds off the angles of the ideas. But

Sister, never a precaution on the part of the priest, against his fellow-man. That which his fellow does, God permits. Let us confine ourselves to prayer, when we think that a danger is approaching us. Let us pray, not for ourselves, but that our brother may not fall into sin on our account.

Strange to say, at that epoch, people still imagined that a wedding was a private and social festival, that a patriarchal banquet does not spoil a domestic solemnity, that gayety, even in excess, provided it be honest, and decent, does happiness no harm, and that, in short, it is a good and a venerable thing that the fusion of these two destinies whence a family is destined to spring, should begin at home, and that the household should thenceforth have its nuptial chamber as its witness. And

A los ignorantes enseñadles lo más que podáis; la sociedad es culpable por no dar instrucción gratis; es responsable de la oscuridad que con esto produce. Si un alma sumida en las tinieblas comete un pecado, el culpable no es en realidad el que peca, sino el que no disipa las tinieblas

How do we know that the creation of worlds is not determined by the fall of grains of sand?

Men and deeds were brought to judgment there. They jeered at the age, which released them from the necessity of understanding it.

What matters it if the earth be red! the moon remains white; these are the indifferences of the sky.

Reeking blood, overcrowded cemeteries, weeping mothers—these are formidable plaintiffs. When the earth is suffering from a surcharge, there are mysterious moanings from the deeps that the heavens hear. Napoleon had been impeached before the Infinite, and his fall was decreed. He annoyed God. Waterloo is not a battle; it is the changing face of the universe.

This blind-man's-buff musketry lasted for a quarter of an hour and killed several panes of glass.

in the first love, the soul is taken far before the body; afterwards the body is taken far before the soul; sometimes the soul is not taken at all...

in a little town, where there are many mouths which talk, and very few heads which think.