Miserables Hugo Quotes

A people, 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. ~ Victor Hugo

To love or to have loved, that is enough. Ask nothing further. ~ Victor Hugo

Does there exist an Infinity outside ourselves? Is that infinity One, immanent and permanent, necessarily having substance, since He is infinite and if He lacked matter He would be limited, necessarily possessing intelligence since He is infinite and, lacking intelligence, He would be in that sense finite. Does this Infinity inspire in us the idea of essense, while to ourselves we can only attribute the idea of existence? In order words, is He not the whole of which we are but the part? ~ Victor Hugo

At another time, on receiving a notification of the decease of a gentleman of the country-side, wherein not only the dignities of the dead man, but also the feudal and noble qualifications of all his relatives, spread over an entire page: "What a stout back Death has!" he exclaimed. "What a strange burden of titles is cheerfully imposed on him, and how much wit must men have, in order thus to press the tomb into the service of vanity! ~ Victor Hugo

This is what floats up confusedly, pell-mell, for the year 1817, and is now forgotten. History neglects nearly all these particulars, and cannot do otherwise; the infinity would overwhelm it. Nevertheless, these details, which are wrongly called trivial, - there are no trivial facts in humanity, nor little leaves in vegetation, - are useful. It is of the physiognomy of the years that the physiognomy of the centuries is composed. In this year of 1817 four young Parisians arranged "a fine farce. ~ Victor Hugo

What dangers you run, O noble souls! Often, you give your heart, but we take only your body. Your heart is left to you and you look at it in the shadows and shudder. ~ Victor Hugo

Youth, even in its sorrows, always has a brilliancy of its own. ~ Victor Hugo

In the domain of art there is no light without heat. ~ Victor Hugo

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

It is a mournful task to break the sombre attachments of the past. ~ Victor Hugo

Men rush to arms for slight causes, or no cause at all, and once taken up there is no longer any respect for law, divine or human. ~ Hugo Grotius

We may be indifferent to the death penalty and not declare ourselves either way so long as we have not seen a guillotine with our own eyes. But when we do, the shock is violent, and we are compelled to choose sides, for or against ... Death belongs to God alone. ~ Victor Hugo

Every year I go to Broadway to see a musical - I like the music. I saw 'Mamma Mia;' I saw 'Les Miserables;' I saw 'Phantom of the Opera' like six, seven times. ~ Rafael Nadal

Love is the only future God offers. ~ Victor Hugo

The utmost extremity of degradation is the obscene merriment to which it gives rise. ~ Victor Hugo

Do you know what friendship is?' he asked.
'Yes,' replied the gypsy; 'it is to be brother and sister; two souls which touch without mingling, two fingers on one hand.'
'And love?' pursued Gringoire.
'Oh! love!' said she, and her voice trembled, and her eye beamed. 'That is to be two and to be but one. A man and a woman mingled into one angel. It is heaven. ~ Victor Hugo

Holly steps back. Being warned about a ghost and seeing him are not the same. 'What did they do to you?'
Some of the Anchorites laugh. Hugo looks back at his long-ago lover. 'They'-he looks about the Chapel-'cured me. They cured me of a terrible wasting disease called mortality. There's a lot of it about. The young hold out for a time, but eventually even the hardiest patient gets reduced to a desiccated embryo, a Strudlebug ... a veined, scrawny, dribbling ... bone clock, whose face betrays how very, very little time they have left. ~ David Mitchell

I will not be browbeaten, however nicely you do it. I am done with things happening to me. From here on out, I am going to happen to things. ~ Courtney Milan

Great griefs exhaust. They discourage us with life. The man into whom they enter feels something taken from him. In youth, their visit is sad; later on, it is ominous. ~ Victor Hugo

If he [Hugo Chavez] thinks we're trying to assassinate him, I think that we really ought to go ahead and do it. ~ Pat Robertson

Nothing becomes reality in the political life of a nation that was not present in its literature as spirit. ~ Hugo Von Hofmannsthal

With certain kinds of people,we allow for the potential development of all the beauties of human virtue within a faith that is different from our own ~ Victor Hugo

My greatest regret at the passing of America-hating strongman Hugo Chavez is that he didn't live long enough to party with Dennis Rodman. ~ Rob Lowe

Notwithstanding the fog which rose around, I perceived the walls and roofs of the houses of Soissons, with a half-moon peering from behind them. I alighted, and, with a heart fully acknowledging the sublimity of nature, gazed upon the imposing scene. A grasshopper was chirping in the neighboring field; the trees by the road side were softly rustling; and I saw, with the mind's eye, Peace hovering over the plain, now solitary and tranquil, where Caesar had conquered, Clovis had exercised his authority, and where Napoleon had all but fallen. It shows that men - even Caesar, Clovis, and Napoleon - are only passing shadows; and that war is a fantasy which terminates with them; whilst God - and Nature, which comes from God - and Peace, which comes from Nature - are things of eternity. ~ Victor Hugo

On emerging from that black and deformed thing which is called the galleys, the Bishop had hurt his soul, as too vivid a light would have hurt his eyes on emerging from the dark. The future life, the possible life which offered itself to him henceforth, all pure and radiant, filled him with tremors and anxiety. He no longer knew where he really was. Like ~ Victor Hugo

and the goodman beheld this apparition, which had bare feet and a tattered petticoat, running about among the flower-beds distributing life around her. The sound of the watering-pot on the leaves filled Father Mabeuf's soul with ecstasy. It seemed to him that the rhododendron was happy now. ~ Victor Hugo

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

Whether we be Italians or Frenchmen, misery concerns us all. Ever since history has been written, ever since philosophy has meditated, misery has been the garment of the human race; the moment has at length arrived for tearing off that rag, and for replacing, upon the naked limbs of the Man-People, the sinister fragment of the past with the grand purple robe of the dawn. ~ Victor Hugo

The audacity of a fine death always affects men. As soon as Enjolras folded his arms and accepted his end, the din of strife ceased in the room, and this chaos suddenly stilled into a sort of sepulchral solemnity. The menacing majesty of Enjolras disarmed and motionless, appeared to oppress this tumult, and this young man, haughty, bloody, and charming, who alone had not a wound, who was as indifferent as an invulnerable being, seemed, by the authority of his tranquil glance, to constrain this sinister rabble to kill him respectfully. His beauty, at that moment augmented by his pride, was resplendent, and he was fresh and rosy after the fearful four and twenty hours which had just elapsed, as though he could no more be fatigued than wounded. It was of him, possibly, that a witness spoke afterwards, before the council of war: "There was an insurgent whom I heard called Apollo." A National Guardsman who had taken aim at Enjolras, lowered his gun, saying: "It seems to me that I am about to shoot a flower. ~ Victor Hugo

I have always said, heard, that it would not be strange that there had been civilization on Mars, but maybe capitalism arrived there, imperialism arrived and finished off the planet, ~ Hugo Chavez

We repeat and again reaffirm that neither a State nor the Federal Government can constitutionally force a person 'to profess a belief or disbelief in any religion.' Neither can constitutionally pass laws or impose requirements which aid all religions as against nonbelievers, and neither can aid those religions based on a belief in the existence of God as against those religions founded on different beliefs. ~ Hugo Black

He feels himself buried in those two infinities, the ocean and the sky, at one and the same time: the one is a tomb; the other is a shroud. ~ Victor Hugo

Freedom and diversity guard each other, and if a country could form the whole of one's character, Napoleon III and Victor Hugo would have been the same person ... if national identity means anything, it means something that comes with you wherever you go, and stays with you no matter how long you stay away. ~ Clive James

There are no trivial facts in humanity, nor little leaves in vegetation. ~ Victor Hugo

All that was neither a city, nor a church, nor a river, nor color, nor light, nor shadow: it was reverie. For a long time, I remained motionless, letting myself be penetrated gently by this unspeakable ensemble, by the serenity of the sky and the melancholy of the moment. I do not know what was going on in my mind, and I could not express it; it was one of those ineffable moments when one feels something in himself which is going to sleep and something which is awakening. ~ Victor Hugo

Well, have you a tongue in your head?' 'I have,' responded Hugo, 'but I was never one to give my head for washing.' 'You're not such a fool as you look,' commented his lordship. ~ Georgette Heyer

God knows better than we do what we need. ~ Victor Hugo

In the future no one will kill anyone, the earth will shine, the human race will love. It will come, citizens, the day when all will be peace, harmony, light, joy, and life, it will come. And it is so that it comes that we are going to die. ~ Victor Hugo

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

Hugo has been infinitely tender with me, but while he talks of June I think of our hands locked together. She does not reach the same sexual center of my being that man reaches; she does not touch that. What, then, has she moved in me? I have wanted to possess her as if I were a man, but I have also wanted her to love me with the eyes, the hands, the senses that only women have. It is a soft and subtle penetration. ~ Anais Nin

The eye of a man should be still more reverent before the rising of a young maiden than before the rising of a star. The possibility of touch should increase respect. The down of the peach, the dust of the plum, the radiated crystal of snow, the butterfly's wing powdered with feathers, are gross things beside that chastity that does not even know it is chaste. The young maiden is only the glimmer of a dream and is not yet statue. Her alcove is hidden in the shadows of the ideal. The indiscreet touch of the eye desecrates this dim penumbra. Here, to gaze, is to profane. ~ Victor Hugo

Should we continue to look upwards? Is the light we can see in the sky one of those which will presently be extinguished? The ideal is terrifying to behold ... brilliant but threatened on all sides by the dark forces that surround it: nevertheless, no more in danger than a star in the jaws of the clouds. ~ Victor Hugo

We live in a sad society. Succeed--that is the advice which falls drop by drop from the overhanging corruption. In passing, we might say that success is a hideous thing. Its false similarity to merit deceives men. ~ Victor Hugo