Quotes by Hugo, Victor

"To love another person is to see the face of God. [Les Miserables]"

Hugo, Victor on love
10 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   

"Nations, like stars, are entitled to eclipse. All is well, provided the light returns and the eclipse does not become endless night. Dawn and resurrection are synonymous. The reappearance of the light is the same as the survival of the soul."

Hugo, Victor on nations   

"The mountains, the forest, and the sea, render men savage; they develop the fierce, but yet do not destroy the human."

Hugo, Victor on nature   

"The convent, which belongs to the West as it does to the East, to antiquity as it does to the present time, to Buddhism and Muhammadanism as it does to Christianity, is one of the optical devices whereby man gains a glimpse of infinity."

Hugo, Victor on nuns   

"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   

"Certain thoughts are prayers. There are moments when, whatever be the attitude of the body, the soul is on its knees."

Hugo, Victor on attitude
5 fans of this quote   

"Popularity? It's glory's small change."

Hugo, Victor on popularity   

"Where the telescope ends, the microscope begins. Which of the two has the grander view?"

Hugo, Victor on potential
3 fans of this quote   

"Do not ask the name of the person who seeks a bed for the night. He who is reluctant to give his name is the one who most needs shelter."

Hugo, Victor on poverty and the poor   

"There are thoughts which are prayers. There are moments when, whatever the posture of the body, the soul is on its knees."

Hugo, Victor on prayer
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   

"Progress is the life-style of man. The general life of the human race is called Progress, and so is its collective march. Progress advances, it makes the great human and earthly journey towards what is heavenly and divine; it has its pauses, when it rallies the stragglers, its stopping places when it meditates, contemplating some new and splendid promised land that has suddenly appeared on its horizon. It has its nights of slumber; and it is one of the poignant anxieties of the thinker to see the human spirit lost in shadow, and to grope in the darkness without being able to awake sleeping progress."

Hugo, Victor on progress   

"Progress is the stride of God."

Hugo, Victor on progress   

"We say that slavery has vanished from European civilization, but this is not true. Slavery still exists, but now it applies only to women and its name is prostitution."

Hugo, Victor on prostitution   

"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   

"Most commonly revolt is born of material circumstances; but insurrection is always a moral phenomenon. Revolt is Masaniello, who led the Neapolitan insurgents in 1647; but insurrection is Spartacus. Insurrection is a thing of the spirit, revolt is a thing of the stomach."

Hugo, Victor on rebellion   

"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   

"Toleration is the best religion."

Hugo, Victor on religion   

"The brutalities of progress are called revolutions. When they are over we realize this: that the human race has been roughly handled, but that it has advanced."

Hugo, Victor on evolution   

"A saint addicted to excessive self-abnegation is a dangerous associate; he may infect you with poverty, and a stiffening of those joints which are needed for advancement -- in a word, with more renunciation than you care for -- and so you flee the contagion."

Hugo, Victor on saints   

"No one ever keeps a secret so well as a child."

Hugo, Victor on secrets   

"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   

"Nothing can be more depressing than to expose, naked to the light of thought, the hideous growth of argot. Indeed it is like a sort of repellent animal intended to dwell in darkness which has been dragged out of its cloaca. One seems to see a horned and living creature viciously struggling to be restored to the place where it belongs. One word is like a claw, another like a sightless and bleeding eye; and there are phrases which clutch like the pincers of a crab. And all of it is alive with the hideous vitality of things that have organized themselves amid disorganization."

Hugo, Victor on slang   

"Society is a republic. When an individual tries to lift themselves above others, they are dragged down by the mass, either by ridicule or slander."

Hugo, Victor on society   

"The book which the reader now holds in his hands, from one end to the other, as a whole and in its details, whatever gaps, exceptions, or weaknesses it may contain, treats of the advance from evil to good, from injustice to justice, from falsity to truth, from darkness to daylight, from blind appetite to conscience, from decay to life, from bestiality to duty, from Hell to Heaven, from limbo to God. Matter itself is the starting-point, and the point of arrival is the soul. Hydra at the beginning, an angel at the end."

Hugo, Victor on story and story-telling   

"Initiative is doing the right thing without being told."

Hugo, Victor on action
3 fans of this quote   

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

Hugo, Victor on action
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"Loving is half of believing."

Hugo, Victor on belief
3 fans of this quote   

"We may remark in passing that to be blind and beloved may, in this world where nothing is perfect, be among the most strangely exquisite forms of happiness. The supreme happiness in life is the assurance of being loved; of being loved for oneself, even in spite of oneself; and this assurance the blind man possesses. In his affliction, to be served is to be caressed. Does he lack anything? no. Possessing love he is not deprived of light. A love, moreover, that is wholly pure. There can be no blindness where there is this certainty."

Hugo, Victor on blindness   

"To learn to read is to light a fire; every syllable that is spelled out is a spark."

Hugo, Victor on books - reading
6 fans of this quote   

"It is from books that wise people derive consolation in the troubles of life."

Hugo, Victor on books - reading   

"As the purse is emptied, the heart is filled."

Hugo, Victor on charity   

"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   

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

Hugo, Victor on time