Quotes from Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

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

A man is not idle because he is absorbed in thought. There is visible labor and there is invisible labor.

Babylon violated diminishes Alexander; Rome enslaved diminishes Caesar; massacred Jerusalem diminishes Titus. Tyranny follows the tyrant. Woe to the man who leaves behind a shadow that bears his form.

Nothing discernable to the eye of the spirit is more brilliant or obscure than man; nothing is more formidible, complex, mysterious, and infinite. There is a prospect greater than the sea, and it is the sky; there is a prospect greater than the sky, and it is the human soul.

The beautiful is as useful as the useful." He added after a moment's silence, "Perhaps more so.

Style is the shape the ideal takes, rhythm, its movement.

... plunged into chance, --that is to say, swallowed up in Providence

There were corpses here and there and pools of blood. I remember seeing a butterfly flutter up and down that street. Summer does not abdicate.

The night was starless and very dark. Without doubt, in the gloom some mighty angel was standing, with outstretched wings, awaiting the soul.

Do not inquire he name if him who asks a shelter of you. The very man who's embarrassed by his name is the one who needs shelter

Intellectual and moral growth is no less indispensable than material amelioration...If three is anything more poignant than a body agonizing for want of bread, it is a soul dying of hunger for light.

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

The peculiarity of sunrise is to make us laugh at all our terrors of the night, and our laugh is always proportioned to the fear we have had.