"One cannot be a good historian of the outward, visible world without giving some thought to the hidden, private life of ordinary people; and on the other hand one cannot be a good historian of this inner life without taking into account outward events where these are relevant. They are two orders of fact which reflect each other, which are always linked and which sometimes provoke each other."

Hugo, Victor on history and historians
3 fans of this quote   

"There is one thing stronger than all the armies in the world, and that is an idea whose time has come."

Hugo, Victor on ideas
6 fans of this quote   

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

Hugo, Victor on idleness
4 fans of this quote   

"Laughter is the sun that drives winter from the human face."

Hugo, Victor on laughter
11 fans of this quote   

"Those who live are those who fight."

Hugo, Victor on life
3 fans of this quote   

"Life is a flower of which love is the honey."

Hugo, Victor on life
7 fans of this quote   

"Be as a bird perched on a frail branch that she feels bending beneath her, still she sings away all the same, knowing she has wings."

Hugo, Victor on animals
5 fans of this quote   

"From the oyster to the eagle, from the swine to the tiger, all animals are to be found in men and each of them exists in some man, sometimes several at the time. Animals are nothing but the portrayal of our virtues and vices made manifest to our eyes, the visible reflections of our souls. God displays them to us to give us food for thought."

Hugo, Victor on animals
3 fans of this quote   

"When a woman is speaking to you, listen to what she says with her eyes."

Hugo, Victor on listening
14 fans of this quote   

"The supreme happiness of life is the conviction that we are loved; loved for ourselves, or rather in spite of ourselves."

Hugo, Victor on love
13 fans of this quote   

"The greatest blunders, like the thickest ropes, are often compounded of a multitude of strands. Take the rope apart, separate it into the small threads that compose it, and you can break them one by one. You think, That is all there was! But twist them all together and you have something tremendous."

Hugo, Victor on mistakes   

"Music expresses that which can not be said and on which it is impossible to be silent"

Hugo, Victor on music
3 fans of this quote   

"In each age men of genius undertake the ascent. From below, the world follows them with their eyes. These men go up the mountain, enter the clouds, disappear, reappear, People watch them, mark them. They walk by the side of precipices. They daringly pursue their road. See them aloft, see them in the distance; they are but black specks. On they go. The road is uneven, its difficulties constant. At each step a wall, at each step a trap. As they rise the cold increases. They must make their ladder, cut the ice and walk on it., hewing the steps in haste. A storm is raging. Nevertheless they go forward in their madness. The air becomes difficult to breath. The abyss yawns below them. Some fall. Others stop and retrace their steps; there is a sad weariness. The bold ones continue. They are eyed by the eagles; the lightning plays about them: the hurricane is furious. No matter, they persevere."

Hugo, Victor on obstacles
4 fans of this quote   

"He, who every morning plans the transactions of the day, and follows that plan, carries a thread that will guide him through a labyrinth of the most busy life."

Hugo, Victor on planning   

"Each man should frame life so that at some future hour fact and his dreaming meet."

Hugo, Victor on planning
3 fans of this quote   

"Such is the remorseless progression of human society, shedding lives and souls as it goes on its way. It is an ocean into which men sink who have been cast out by the law and consigned, with help most cruelly withheld, to moral death. The sea is the pitiless social darkness into which the penal system casts those it has condemned, an unfathomable waste of misery. The human soul, lost in those depths, may become a corpse. Who shall revive it?"

Hugo, Victor on prison   

"Let us have compassion for those under chastisement. Alas, who are we ourselves? Who am I and who are you? Whence do we come and is it quite certain that we did nothing before we were born? This earth is not without some resemblance to a gaol. Who knows but that man is a victim of divine justice? Look closely at life. It is so constituted that one senses punishment everywhere."

Hugo, Victor on punishment   

"We are on the side of religion as opposed to religions, and we are among those who believe in the wretched inadequacy of sermons and the sublimity of prayer."

Hugo, Victor on religion   

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

Hugo, Victor on love
40 fans of this quote   

"Our acts make or mar us, we are the children of our own deeds."

Hugo, Victor on action
7 fans of this quote   

"Superstition, bigotry and prejudice, ghosts though they are, cling tenaciously to life; they are shades armed with tooth and claw. They must be grappled with unceasingly, for it is a fateful part of human destiny that it is condemned to wage perpetual war against ghosts. A shade is not easily taken by the throat and destroyed."

Hugo, Victor on superstition   

"My tastes are aristocratic, my actions democratic."

Hugo, Victor on taste   

"Thought is the labor of the intellect, reverie is its pleasure."

Hugo, Victor on thoughts and thinking
3 fans of this quote   

"Short as life is, we make it still shorter by the careless waste of time."

Hugo, Victor on waste
5 fans of this quote   

"People do not lack strength; they lack will."

Hugo, Victor on power
7 fans of this quote   

"Common sense is in spite of, not as the result of education."

Hugo, Victor on common sense
7 fans of this quote   

"Have courage for the great sorrows of life, and patience for the small ones. When you have laboriously accomplished your daily tasks, go to sleep in peace. God is awake."

Hugo, Victor on courage
5 fans of this quote   

"He does not weep who does not see."

Hugo, Victor on cries and crying
9 fans of this quote   

"Great perils have this beauty, that they bring to light the fraternity of strangers."

Hugo, Victor on anger   

"be as a bird perched on a frail branch "

Hugo, Victor on   

"I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this year's fashions."

Hellman, Lillian on science
3 fans of this quote   

"Nobody knows what you want except you. And nobody will be as sorry as you if you don't get it. Wanting some other way to live is proof enough of deserving it. Having it is hard work, but not having it is sheer hell."

Hellman, Lillian on determination
5 fans of this quote   

"The world breaks everyone and afterward many are stronger at the broken places."

Hemingway, Ernest on adversity
18 fans of this quote   

"It's enough for you to do it once for a few men to remember you. But if you do it year after year, then many people remember you and they tell it to their children, and their children and grandchildren remember and, if it concerns books, they can read them. And if it's good enough, it will last as long as there are human beings."

Hemingway, Ernest on excellence
4 fans of this quote   

"In going where you have to go, and doing what you have to do, and seeing what you have to see, you dull and blunt the instrument you write with. But I would rather have it bent and dulled and know I had to put it on the grindstone again and hammer it into shape and put a whetstone to it, and know that I had something to write about, than to have it bright and shining and nothing to say, or smooth and well oiled in the closet, but unused."

Hemingway, Ernest on experience
4 fans of this quote   

"There are some things which cannot be learned quickly, and time, which is all we have, must be paid heavily for their acquiring. They are the very simplest things and because it takes a man's life to know them the little new that each man gets from life is very costly and the only heritage he has to leave."

Hemingway, Ernest on learning   

"Every man's life ends the same way. It is only the details of how he lived and how he died that distinguish one man from another."

Hemingway, Ernest on life
9 fans of this quote   

"I like to listen. I have learned a great deal from listening carefully. Most people never listen."

Hemingway, Ernest on listening
10 fans of this quote   

"You know lots of criticism is written by characters who are very academic and think it is a sign you are worthless if you make jokes or kid or even clown. I wouldn't kid Our Lord if he was on the cross. But I would attempt a joke with him if I ran into him chasing the money changers out of the temple."

Hemingway, Ernest on criticism
5 fans of this quote   

"How simple the writing of literature would be if it were only necessary to write in another way what has been well written. It is because we have had such great writers in the past that a writer is driven far out past where he can go, out to where no one can help him."

Hemingway, Ernest on literature