Quotes from Victor Hugo

There is nothing like a dream to create the future. Utopia to-day, flesh and blood tomorrow.

What greater flood can there be than the flood of ideas? How quickly they submerge all that they set out to destroy, how rapidly do they create terrifying depths?

The merciful precepts of Christ will at last suffuse the Code and it will glow with their radiance. Crime will be considered an illness with its own doctors to replace your judges and its hospitals to replace your prisons. Liberty shall be equated with health. Ointments and oil shall be applied to limbs that were once shackled and branded. Infirmities that once were scourged with anger shall now be bathed with love. The cross in place of the gallows: sublime and yet so simple.

A phenomenon often seen. A sceptic adhering to a believer; that is as simple as the law of the complementary colours. What we lack attracts us. Nobody loves the light like the blind man...

Do you hear the people sing? Singing a song of angry men

La lumière est dans le livre. Ouvrez le livre tout grand. Laissez-le rayonner, laissez-le faire.

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

Can human nature ever be wholly and radically transformed? Can the man whom God made good be made wicked by man? Can the soul be reshaped in its entirety by destiny and made evil because destiny is evil? Can the heart become misshapen and afflicted with ugly, incurable deformities under disproportionate misfortune, like a spinal column bent beneath a too low roof?

At the side of Enjolras, who represented the logic of revolution, was Combeferre, representing its philosophy. The difference between logic and philosophy is that one can decide upon war, whereas the other can only be fulfilled by peace.

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

Let us admit, without bitterness, that the individual has his distinct interests and can, without felony, stipulate for those interests and defend them. The present has its pardonable amount of egotism; momentary life has its claims, and cannot be expected to sacrifice itself incessantly to the future. The generation which is in its turn passing over the earth is not forced to abridge its life for the sake of the generations, its equals after all, whose turn shall come later on.

Press on! A better fate awaits thee.

To commit the least possible sin is the law for man. To live without sin is the dream of an angel. Everything terrestrial is subject to sin. Sin is a gravitation.

When a man does wrong, he should do all the wrong he can; it is madness to stop half-way in crime!

People do not read stupidities with impunity.

A benevolent malefactor, merciful, gentle, helpful, clement, a convict, returning good for evil, giving back pardon for hatred, preferring pity to vengeance, preferring to ruin himself rather than to ruin his enemy, saving him who had smitten him, kneeling on the heights of virtue, more nearly akin to an angel than to a man. Javert was constrained to admit to himself that this monster existed. Things could not go on in this manner.

What I feel for you seems less of earth and more of a cloudless heaven.

A shadow is hard to seize by the throat and dash to the ground.

I advance in life, I grow more simple, and I become more and more patriotic for humanity.

God manifests himself to us in the first degree through the life of the universe, and in the second degree through the thought of man. The second manifestation is not less holy than the first. The first is named Nature, the second is named Art.

You asked me why I saved you. You have forgotten a villain who tried to carry you off one night,- a villain to whom the very next day you brought relief upon their infamous pillory. A drop of water and a little pity are more than my whole life can ever repay. You have forgotten that villain; but he remembers. ~Quasimodo to Esmeralda~

Homo homini monstrum

The wise man is he who knows when and how to stop

The most beautiful of altars, he said, is the soul of an unhappy creature consoled and thankfing God.