Quotes from Victor Hugo

There is suffering in the light; in excess it burns. Flame is hostile to the wing. To burn and yet to fly, that is the miracle of genius.

She might have melted a heart of stone, but nothing can melt a heart of wood.

You look at a star for two reasons, because it is luminous, and because it is impenetrable.

According to an eastern fable, the rose was white when God created it, but when, as it unfolded, it felt Adam's eyes upon it, it blushed in modesty and turned pink.

The terrible shock of his sentence had in some way broken that wall which separates us from the mystery of things beyond and which we call life.

Intelligence is the wife, imagination is the mistress, memory is the servant.

D'une complexion farouche et bavarde, ayant le désir de ne voir personne et le besoin de parler à quelqu'un, il se tirait d'affaire en se parlant à lui-même. Quiconque a vécu solitaire sait à quel point le monologue est dans la nature. La parole intérieure démange. Haranguer l'espace est un exutoire. Parler tout haut et tout seul, cela fait l'effet d'un dialogue avec le dieu qu'on a en soit.

There were corpses here and there and pools of blood. I remember seeing a butterfly flutter up and down that street. Summer does not abdicate.

winter always carries with it something of our sadness; then April came, that daybreak of summer, fresh like every dawn, gay like every childhood; weeping a little sometimes like the infant that it is. Nature in this month has charming gleams which pass from the sky, the clouds, the trees, the fields, and the flowers, into the heart of man.

Then live your life, above all things. Make use of your I while you have it.

For with love there is no middle course: it destroys, or else it saves. All human destiny is contained in that dilemma, the choice between destruction and salvation, which is nowhere more implacably posed than in love. Love is life, or it is death. It is the cradle, but also the coffin. One and the same impulse moves the human heart to say yes or no. Of all things God has created it is the human heart that sheds the brightest light and, alas, the blackest despair.

if she had not been a gypsy, and if he had not been a priest

Something more terrible than a hell where one suffers may be imagined, and that is a hell where one is bored.

So struggled beneath its anguish this unhappy soul. Eighteen hundred years before this unfortunate man, the mysterious Being, in whom are aggregated all the sanctities and all the sufferings of humanity, He also, while the olive trees were shivering in the fierce breathe of the Infinite, had long put away from his hand the fearful chalice that appeared before him, dripping with shadow and running over with darkness, in the star-filled depths.

It will come, citizens, the day when all shall be concord, harmony, light, joy and life; it will come, and it is so that it may come that we are going to die.

Nothing is small, in fact; any one who is subject to the profound and penetrating influence of nature knows this.

Man has a tyrant, ignorance. I voted for the demise of that particular tyrant. That particular tyrant has engendered royalty, which is authority based on falsehood, whereas science is authority based on truth. Man should be governed by science alone. And conscience, added the bishop. It's the same thing. Conscience is the quota of innate science we each have inside us.

The scaffold is the accomplice of the executioner; it devours, it eats flesh, it drinks blood; the scaffold is a sort of monster fabricated by the judge and the carpenter, a spectre which seems to live with a horrible vitality composed of all the death which it has inflicted.

Now, one cannot read nonsense with impunity.

Fex urbis, lex orbis (The dregs of the city, the law of the earth), from Les Miserables, attributed to St. Jerome

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.

It is grievous for a man to leave behind him a shadow in his own shape.

Without knowing it, Javert in his awful happiness was deserving of pity, like every ignorant man who triumphs. Nothing could have been more poignant or more heartrending than that countenance on which was inscribed all the evil in what is good.

Les livres sont des amis froids et sûrs.