Quotes from Victor Hugo

We see past time in a telescope and present time in a microscope. Hence the apparent enormities of the present.

I like the laughter that opens the lips and the heart, shows at the same time the pearls and the soul.

All animals are to be found in men and each of theme exists in some man, sometimes several at the time.

To live a life which is a perpetual falsehood is to suffer unknown tortures.

During a wise man's whole life, his destiny holds his philosophy in a state of siege.

...Though we chisel away as best we can at the mysterious block from which our life is made, the black vein of destiny continually reappears.

His whole life was now summed up in two words: absolute uncertainty within an impenetrable fog.

Progress is the life-style of man.

I'm not in the world to guard my own life, but to guard souls

That men saw his mask, but the bishop saw his face. That men saw his life, but the bishop saw his conscience.

Well, for us, in history where goodness is a rare pearl, he who was good almost takes precedence over he who was great.

Without vanity, without coquetry, without curiosity, in a word, without the fall, woman would not be woman. Much of her grace is in her frailty.

Love, in the eyes of the world, is either a carnal appetite or a vague fancy, which possession extinguishes or absence destroys. That is why it is commonly said, with a strange abuse of words, that passion does not endure.

Nothing can be sadder or more profound than to see a thousand things for the first and last time.

One cannot resist an idea whose time has come.

Where no plan is laid, where the disposal of time is surrendered merely to the chance of incident, chaos will soon reign.

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.

One believes others will do what he will do to himself.

What a grand thing, to be loved! What a grander thing still, to love!

Take all reasonable advantage of that which the present may offer you. It is the only time which is ours. Yesterday is buried forever, and to-morrow we may never see.

Thus, during those nineteen years of torture and slavery, did this soul rise and fall at the same time. Light entered on the one side, and darkness on the other.

To rove about, musing, that is to say loitering, is, for a philosopher, a good way of spending time.

If she gives me all her time it is because I have all her heart.

To love beauty is to see light.