Quotes from Victor Hugo

Now life has killed the dream I dreamed.

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.

He sought...to transform the grief which looks down into the grave by showing it the grief which looks up to the stars.

No fear, no regrets.

In short, between men and women you want... Equality. Equality! You can't mean it. Man and woman are two different creatures. I said equality. I didn't say identity.

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.

I'd rather be the head of a fly than the tail of a lion.

The memory of an absent person shines in the deepest recesses of the heart, shining the more brightly the more wholly its object has vanished: a light on the horizon of the despairing, darkened spirit; a star gleaming in our inward night.

At least you are mine! Soon – in a few months, perhaps, my angel will sleep in my arms, will awaken in my arms, will live there. All your thought at all moments, all your looks will be for me; all my thought, all my moments, all my looks will be for you!

Argot is nothing more nor less than a wardrobe in which language, having some bad deed to do, disguises itself. It puts on word-masks and metaphoric rags.

Night and the day, when united, Bring forth the beautiful light.

The need of the immaterial is the most deeply rooted of all needs. One must have bread; but before bread, one must have the ideal.

What love commences can be finished by God alone.

The reduction of the universe to a single being, the expansion of a single being even to God, this is love.

My misfortune is that I still resemble a man too much. I should liked to be wholly a beast like that goat. - Quasimodo

Oh! if the good hearts had the fat purses, how much better everything would go!

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

The beginning as well as the end of all his thoughts was hatred of human law, that hatred which, if it be not checked in its growth by some providential event, becomes, in a certain time, hatred of society, then hatred of the human race, and then hatred of creation, and reveals itself by a vague and incessant desire to injure some living being, it matters not who.

Respirer Paris, cela conserve l'âme.

What is fright by night is curiosity by day.

His universal compassion was due less to natural instinct, than to a profound conviction, a sum of thoughts that in the course of living had filtered through to his heart: for in the nature of man, as in rock, there may be channels hollowed by the dropping of water, and these can never be destroyed.

I was confided to your loyalty and accepted by your treason; you offer my death to those to whom you had promised my life. Do you know who it is you are destroying here? It is yourself.

There are no bad herbs or bad men; there are only bad cultivators.

There is a prospect greater than the sea, and that is the sky; there is a prospect greater than the sky, and it is the human soul.