Victor Quotes

Every one has noticed the taste which cats have for pausing and lounging between the two leaves of a half-shut door. Who is there who has not said to a cat, "Do come in! ~ Victor Hugo

Strong and rare natures are thus created; misery, almost always a stepmother, is sometimes a mother; privation gives birth to power of soul and mind; distress is the nurse of self-respect; misfortune is a good breast for great souls. ~ Victor Hugo

Far be it from me to insult the pun! I honor it in proportion to its merits; nothing more. All the most august, the most sublime, the most charming of humanity, and perhaps outside of humanity, have made puns. ~ Victor Hugo

Laughter is the sun that drives winter from the human face. ~ Victor Hugo

The best minds have their soft spots and sometimes feel somewhat bruised by the scant respect of logic. ~ Victor Hugo

Since we shall love each other, I shall be great and you shall be rich. ~ Victor Hugo

The soul has illusions as the bird has wings: it is supported by them. ~ Victor Hugo

the phantom of social justice tormented him. ~ Victor Hugo

Ecclesiastes calls you the All-powerful; the Maccabees call you the Creator; the Epistle to the Ephesians calls you liberty; Baruch calls you Immensity; the Psalms call you Wisdom and Truth; John calls you Light; the Books of Kings call you Lord; Exodus calls you Providence; Leviticus, Sanctity; Esdras, Justice; the creation calls you God; man calls you Father; but Solomon calls you Compassion, and that is the most beautiful of all your names. ~ Victor Hugo

In these creations, life and symbolic value are not in contradiction: they intensify each other. ~ Victor Hugo

There is no such thing as a little country. The greatness of a people is no more determined by their numbers than the greatness of a man is by his height. ~ Victor Hugo

He who conquers is not the victor unless the loser considers himself beaten (qui vincit non est victor nisi victus fatebur). ~ Ennius

If it hadn't been for this chance hospital encounter, accidental in all senses, Victor might never have courted a girl. He already felt well on his way to middle age, and his social life was still limited to the chess club. Victor didn't really feel the need for another person in his life, in fact he found the concept of "sharing" a life bizarre. He had mathematics, which filled up his time almost completely, so he wasn't entirely sure what he wanted with a wife. Women seemed to him to be in possession of all kinds of undesirable properties, chiefly madness, but also a multiplicity of physical drawbacks - blood, sex, children - which were unsettling and other. ~ Kate Atkinson

Going through all this nonsense to reach someone in charge, this was the first time she'd ever been treated like, well, a patient. With rules that defied all common logic; people employed to help you who are unable, really, to even hear you; the sense that the system's goal is only to keep trouble contained. It's ~ Victor LaValle

Lesson taught by History: do not fight Russians in their own territory. ~ Victor Bello Accioly

Adversity makes men, and prosperity makes monsters. ~ Victor Hugo

This is your last chance, Moorlock. ~ Victor Kloss

To meditate is to labour; to think is to act. Folded arms work, closed hands perform, a gaze fixed on heaven is a toil. ~ Victor Hugo

Our minds had met and crossed and understood from the first moment when Victor introduced us in my club, and that queer, inexplicable bond of the heart, breaking through every barrier, every restraint, had kept us close to one another always, in spite of silence, absence, and long years of separation. ~ Daphne Du Maurier

In a Jewish theological seminar there was an hours-long discussion about proofs of the existence of God. After some hours, one rabbi got up and said, "God is so great, he does not even need to exist." ~ Victor Frederick Weisskopf

People generally will soon understand that writers should be judged, not according to rules and species, which are contrary to nature and art, but according to the immutable principles of the art of composition, and the special laws of their individual temperaments. ~ Victor Hugo

Design is a conscious and intuitive effort to impose meaningful order. Design is both the underlying matrix of order and the tool that creates it. ~ Victor Papanek

Going about one's native land one is inclined to take many things for granted, roads and buildings, roofs, windows and doorways, the walls that shelter strangers, the house one has never entered, trees which are like other trees, pavements which are no more than cobblestones. But when we are distant from them we find that those things have become dear to us, a street, trees and roofs, blank walls, doors and windows; we have entered those houses without knowing it, we have left something of our heart in the very stonework. Those places we no longer see, perhaps will never see again but still remember, have acquired and aching charm; they return to us with the melancholy of ghosts, a hallowed vision and as it were the true face of France. We love and evoke them such as they were; and such as to us they still are, we cling to them and will not have them altered, for the face of our country is our mother's face. ~ Victor Hugo

Alongside the viciousness of much of German politics in the Weimar years was an incongruous innocence: few people could imagine the worst possibilities. A civilized nation could not possibly vote for Hitler, some had thought. When he became chancellor nonetheless, millions expected his time in office to be short and ineffectual. Germany was a notoriously law-abiding as well as cultured land. How could a German government systematically brutalize its own people? German Jews were highly assimilated and patriotic. Many refused to leave their homeland, even as things got worse and worse. "I am German and am waiting for the Germans to come back; they have gone to ground somewhere," Victor Klemperer wrote in his diary--he was the son of a rabbi and a veteran of the First World War who chose to stay, and miraculously survived.

Few Germans in 1933 could imagine Treblinka or Auschwitz, the mass shootings of Babi Yar or the death marches of the last months of the Second World War. It is hard to blame them for not foreseeing the unthinkable. Yet their innocence failed them, and they were catastrophically wrong about their future. We who come later have one advantage over them: we have their example before us. ~ Benjamin Carter Hett

To be a saint is the exception; to be a just person is the rule. Err, stumble, commit sin, but be one of the just. ~ Victor Hugo

Unhappy voters thought the anemic economy, Obamacare, the collapse of U.S. foreign policy, the scandals in government, and the incompetent handling of everything from the Islamic State to Ebola were the only real issues. Democrats'€ refusal to acknowledge them did not make these failures go away. ~ Victor Davis Hanson

Water! pretending to be pure, thou resemblest false friends. Thou art warm at the top and cold at bottom. ~ Victor Hugo

You've picked up a rummy habit," James Banister said cordially as they approached one another. "Sort of a crouch. You look a bit ... well, I'm sorry, but you look a bit Victor Hugo, if you catch my drift. Would you like to adjourn to a cathedral or something? ~ Nick Harkaway

With Cosette's garter, Homer would make the Iliad. He would put into his poem an old babbler like me, and he would call him Nestor. ~ Victor Hugo

I don't want to miss out on the chance of having a good time. ~ Victor Webster

The slightest contact with logic makes all false arguments disintegrate. ~ Victor Hugo

There have been in this century only one great man and one great thing: Napoleon and liberty. For want of the great man, let us have the great thing. ~ Victor Hugo

She was a lovely blonde, with fine teeth. She had gold and pearls for her dowry; but her gold was on her head, and her pearls were in her mouth. ~ Victor Hugo

We teachers make the road, others will make the journey. ~ Victor Hugo

Did not i say that things would come right of themselves? said the Bishop. Then he added, with a smile, To him who contents himself with the surplice of a curate, God sends the cope of an archbishop. Monseigneur, murmured the cure, throwing back his head with a smile. God or the Devil. ~ Victor Hugo

While contemplating the bride, and eyeing the cake of soap, he muttered between his teeth: 'Tuesday. It was not Tuesday. Was it Tuesday? Perhaps it was Tuesday. Yes, it was Tuesday.'
No one has ever discovered to what this monologue referred. Yes, perchance, this monologue had some connection with the last occasion on which he had dined, three days before, for it was now Friday. ~ Victor Hugo

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

Books are remote but reliable friends. ~ Victor Hugo

history is one sided, none of the stories are wholly true. We only hear the stories the victor wants told. The remaining stories, the plights, justifications and heroics of the losers are gone with time. Ours is such a history. We are stronger, yet rarely ~ H.K. Savage

To be a saint is the exception; to be an upright man is the rule. Err, fall, sin if you will, but be upright. ~ Victor Hugo

Everything in life begins as a dream. That is how the gods speak to us. First the dream and then the reality. Believe that and work for it and then the gods are on your side. ~ Victor Canning

Clothes are a kind of uniform. A nun's habit, a surgeon's scrubs, a cop's uniform. People often say that when they put on a certain uniform, they actually think of themselves differently. ~ Victor LaValle

In our civilization there are fearful hours - such are those when the criminal law pronounces shipwreck upon a man. What a mournful moment is that in which society withdraws itself and gives up a thinking being forever. ~ Victor Hugo

A mother's arms are made of tenderness and children sleep soundly in them. ~ Victor Hugo

Woe, alas, to the one who shall have loved bodies, forms, appearances only. Death will take everything from him. Try to love souls, you shall find them again ~ Victor Hugo

It's two A.M. "To sleep or to write that is the question?" Whether it tis nobler to suffer the slings and arrows of my piss poor punctuation or take arms against a sea of keys with so many new possibilities. ~ Stanley Victor Paskavich

He leaned back against the Jeep and smiled. "More orders for your CEO, Madam President?"
Her eyes were huge and solemn with concern. "I want you to be very careful tonight."
"I will," he promised.
"Joel, I love you. You know that, don't you?"
For an instant he was stunned at the admission. Then elation soared in him. For the moment, at least, it blotted out all the other things he had been
feeling since he'd walked into his apartment and seen the evidence of Victor Copeland's ungovernable rage. He reached for Letty.
"Damn, Letty," he muttered thickly, "you've picked a fine time to tell me." He pulled her into his arms, fumbling for the feel of her through the plump
layers of her Thornquist Gear down coat. "You know I love you, too, don't you?"
"Well, you hadn't actually said so," she reminded him. The comment was tart, but her eyes were brimming with delight. "However, I have been
extremely optimistic."
"Don't ever forget it." He kissed her mouth, the only part of her that was not swallowed up by her voluminous jacket. Her lips were warm in spite of
the cold air. Joel groaned and pulled her closer. ~ Jayne Ann Krentz

Reason is intelligence taking exercise. Imagination is intelligence with an erection. ~ Victor Hugo

Dor remembered Victor's voice.
And while they deepen with age, voices
are, to one destined to listen for eternity,
as distinct as a fingerprint. Dor knew it
was him the moment Victor spoke in the
shop. ~ Mitch Albom

And Ulysses stopped up his ears against the siren's song," recited Victor, pulling the plugs from his own ears as Serena collapsed to the dirt lot, "for it was death. ~ V.E Schwab

Homer is one of the men of genius who solve that fine problem of art - the finest of all, perhaps - truly to depict humanity by the enlargement of man: that is, to generate the real in the ideal. ~ Victor Hugo

Among all these passionate hearts and all these undoubting minds there was one skeptic. How did he happen to be there? From juxtaposition. The name of this skeptic was Grantaire, and he usually signed with this rebus: R. Grantaire was a man who took good care not to believe in anything. ~ Victor Hugo

I am come to warn you. I am come to impeach your happiness. It is fashioned out of the misery of your neighbour. You have everything, and that is composed of the nothing of others… As for me, I am but a voice. Mankind is a mouth, of which I am the cry. You shall hear me! ~ Victor Hugo

When I see humanity ripped apart and events patched up, and so many spots on the sun and so many holes in the moon, when I see so much misery everywhere, I suspect that God is not rich. The appearance exists, it is true, but I feel that he is hard up. ~ Victor Hugo

Again, wars do not really end until the conditions that started them
a bellicose government, an aggressive leader, a national policy of brinksmanship
are eliminated. Otherwise, there remains a bellum interruptum, much like the so-called Peace of Nicias, when Athens and Sparta agreed to a time-out in 421 B.C., before going at each other with renewed and deadly fury in 415 B.C. ~ Victor Davis Hanson

Nihilism has no substance. There is no such thing as nothingness, and zero does not exist. Everything is something. Nothing is nothing. ~ Victor Hugo

Fortune's unjust; she ruins oft the brave, and him who should be victor, makes the slave. ~ John Dryden

Occasionally, a finger comes up to wipe a tear [of laughter] from the eye ... and that's my reward ... the rest goes to the government. ~ Victor Borge

I wanted to scare her," Cody repeated. "Make her leave it alone." Victor let out a surprised laugh. It was one that had served him well in courtrooms, and it didn't fail him this time. Cody flinched again. "Make her 'leave it alone?'" Victor repeated in disbelief. "You just made her more determined, you little idiot." Cody's unkempt eyebrows drew together. "She's just a girl." "That makes her more dangerous, you fool! She'll work twice as hard to get the accolades her male counterparts take as their due." Victor ~ Stephanie A. Cain

The ideal and the beautiful are identical; the ideal corresponds to the idea, and beauty to form; hence idea and substance are cognate. ~ Victor Hugo

The visit took place. It was a formidable campaign; a nocturnal battle against pestilence and suffocation. ~ Victor Hugo

Human beings are no damn good," he said. "We are even worse than animals. We like ... "
He trailed off, cleared his throat, but his voice hardly reached a whisper.
"We like monsters," he said. ~ Victor LaValle

The great hatred of capitalism in the hearts of the oppressed, ancient and modern, I think, stems not merely from the ensuing vast inequality in wealth, and the often unfair and arbitrary nature of who profits and who suffers, but from the silent acknowledgement that under a free market economy the many victims of the greed of the few are still better off than those under the utopian socialism of the well-intended. It is a hard thing for the poor to acknowledge benefits from their rich moral inferiors who never so intended it. (p.272) ~ Victor Davis Hanson

I'd like to lose enough weight so that my bones creaked louder than the floor ~ Stanley Victor Paskavich

Watch an Ant, Watch the bees, feel wind move the leaves. Touch your smile above your chin from the glorious world we all live in. ~ Stanley Victor Paskavich

When they saw him making money, they said, "He is a man of business." When they saw him scattering his money about, they said, "He is an ambitious man." When he was seen to decline honors, they said, "He is an adventurer." When they saw him repulse society, they said, "He is a brute. ~ Victor Hugo

I press my face against his chest, inhale his scent, take comfort from it. "I'm so sorry, Victor. I'm not sure I realized how truly awful this is for you."
"It could be worse. I might not have you."
I sink against him.
"Trust me," he whispers. ~ J.A. London

Innocence wears its own crown, Monsieur; it needs no added dignity; it is as sublime in rags as in royal robes. ~ Victor Hugo

When we are no longer able to change the situation, we are challenged to change ourselves." - Victor Frankl ~ Peter Voogd

The peculiar property of truth is never to commit excesses. What need has it of exaggeration? There ~ Victor Hugo

Nature is pitiless; she never withdraws her flowers, her music, her fragrance, and her sunlight from before human cruelty or suffering. ~ Victor Hugo

That is the explanation of war, an outrage by humanity upon humanity in despite of humanity. ~ Victor Hugo

I choose to be a victor, and not a victim of change. ~ Kcat Yarza

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

To die is nothing; but it is terrible not to live. ~ Victor Hugo

To love your neighbors is to see the face of God.
- Les Miserables ~ Victor Hugo

A noble soul and real poetic talent are almost always inseparable. ~ Victor Hugo

Women have to be careful to not wear out their husbands on their honeymoons, or they get so weak that they can't go to work! ~ Victor Villasenor

To be wicked does not insure prosperity - for the inn did not succeed well. ~ Victor Hugo

In the case of sand as in that of woman, there is a fineness which is treacherous. ~ Victor Hugo

The temple, in its standing there, first gives to things their look and to men their outlook on themselves. This view remains open as long as the work is a work, as long as the god has not fled from it. It is the same with the sculpture of the god, a votive offering of the victor in the athletic games. It is not a portrait whose purpose is to make it easier to realize how the god looks; rather, it is a work that lets the god himself be present and thus is the god himself. The same holds for the linguistic work. In the tragedy nothing is staged or displayed theatrically, but the battle of the new gods against the old is being fought. The linguistic work, originating in the speech of the people, does not refer to this battle; it transforms the people's saying so that now every living word fights the battle and puts up for decision what is holy and what unholy, what lofty and what flighty, what master and what slave. ~ Martin Heidegger

In other nightmares, in his everyday reality, Victor watched his father take a drink of vodka on a completely empty stomach. Victor could hear that near-poison fall, then hit, flesh and blood, nerve and vein. Maybe it was like lightning tearing an old tree into halves. Maybe it was like a wall of water, a reservation tsunami, crashing onto a small beach. Maybe it was like Hiroshima or Nagasaki. Maybe it was like all that. Maybe. But after he drank, Victor's father would breathe in deep and close his eyes, stretch, and straighten his neck and back. During those long drinks, Victor's father wasn't shaped like a question mark. He looked more like an exclamation point. ~ Sherman Alexie

Reaction - a boat which is going against the current but which does not prevent the river from flowing on. ~ Victor Hugo

Poetry is more than a form of art. It's a vibration and a pulsing heart. Whether it's sour or whether it's sweet. It can give you strength no one can defeat ~ Stanley Victor Paskavich

Behind every American soldier, dozens of their countrymen tonight sleep soundly - and hundreds more in their shadow abroad will wake up alive and safe. ~ Victor Davis Hanson

Every bird that flies has the thread of the infinite in its claw. ~ Victor Hugo

Man is at the mercy of events. Life is a perpetual succession of events, and we must submit to it. We never know from what quarter the sudden blow of chance will come. Catastrophe and good fortune come upon us and then depart, like unexpected visitors. They have their own laws, their own orbits, their own gravitational force, all independent of man. ~ Victor Hugo

A person looked at me and said "I can't believe you eat ice cream when it's cold out" "I replied oh that's nothing I drink water also when it rains ~ Stanley Victor Paskavich

This child was well muffled up in a pair of man's trousers, but he did not get them from his father, and a woman's chemise, but he did not get it from his mother. Some people or other had clothed him in rags out of charity. Still, he had a father and a mother. But his father did not think of him, and his mother did not love him. He was one of those children most deserving of pity, among all, one of those who have father ~ Victor Hugo

Do not economize on the hymeneal rites; do not prune them of their splendor, nor split farthings on the day when you are radiant. A wedding is not house-keeping. ~ Victor Hugo

In love there are no friends everywhere where there is a pretty woman hostility is open. ~ Victor Hugo

This first glance of a soul which does not yet know itself is like dawn in the heavens; it is the awakening of something radiant and unknown. ~ Victor Hugo

There is a crime commited by the society against the individual,a crime that is commited afresh each day ~ Victor Hugo

The first proof of charity in a priest, especially a bishop, is poverty. ~ Victor Hugo

Men are still men. The despot's wickedness Comes of ill teaching, and of power's excess,
Comes of the purple he from childhood wears, Slaves would be tyrants if the chance were theirs. ~ Victor Hugo

I believe that acting in any medium is the same thing, it's discovering the truth in where you are. ~ Victor Garber

If you do like what you do, you're cooperating and sharing. ~ Victor Koo

Is it not when the fall is the lowest that charity ought to be the greatest? ~ Victor Hugo

Fuck the meek. The despised will inherit the earth! ~ Victor LaValle

To contemplate is to look at shadows. ~ Victor Hugo