Quotes from Victor Hugo

Do you know what friendship is?' he asked. 'Yes,' answered the gipsy; 'it is to be brother and sister, two souls which meet without mingling, two fingers of one hand.' 'And love?' continued Gringoire. 'Oh, love!' said she, and her voice trembled and her eye brightened. 'That is to be two and yet but one. A man and a woman blended into an angel. It is heaven itself.

It is nothing to die; it is horrible not to live.

And, moreover, when it happens that both are sincere and good, nothing will mix and amalgamate more easily than an old priest and an old soldier. In reality, they are the same kind of man. One has devoted himself to country upon earth, the other to his country in heaven; there is no other difference.

A soul for a piece of bread. Misery makes the offer; society accepts.

That night, before going to bed, he went on to say, 'Never be afraid of thieves and murderers. They represent the dangers without, which are not worth worrying about. Be afraid of ourselves. Prejudices are the real thieves, vices are the murderers. The greatest dangers are within us. Who cares who threatens our heads or our purses! Let's think only of what threatens our souls.

L'istinto di Cosette cercava un padre, come quello di Valjean cercava un figlio, e incontrarsi, per essi, significò trovarsi; nel momento misterioso in cui le loro mani s'incontrarono, si saldarono. Quando quelle due anime si scorsero, riconobbero di essere ciascuna quel che abbisognava all'altra e s'abbracciarono strettamente.

Tu n'es plus là où tu étais, mais tu es partout là où je suis.

You who are Prejudice, Abuse, Ignominy, Oppression, Iniquity, Despotism, Injustice, Fanaticism, beware of the wide-eyed urchin. He will grow up.

Supreme resources spring from extreme resolutions. Les Miserables, page 674

As for us, we respect the past here and there, and we spare it, above all, provided that it consents to be dead. If it insists on being alive, we attack it, and we try to kill it.

It was all over with him. Marius loved a woman. His destiny was entering upon the unknown.

He sleeps. Although his fate was very strange, he lived. He died when he had no longer his angel. The thing came to pass simply, of itself, as the night comes when day is gone.

Yok ettikleri insan?n bir zekas?, hayata güvenen bir akl?, ölüme haz?r olmayan bir ruhu olduÄŸunu hiç düÅŸünmemiÅŸler midir?

A chair is not a caste.

You ask me what forces me to speak? a strange thing; my conscience. . . . You ask why I speak? I am neither informed against, nor pursued, nor hunted, say you. Yes! I am informed against! yes! I am pursued! yes! I am hunted! By whom? by myself. It is I myself who bar the way before myself, and I drag myself, and I urge myself, and I check myself and I exert myself, and when one holds himself he is well held.

In 1815, M. Charles-Francois-Bienvenu Myriel was Bishop of D—— He was an old man of about seventy-five years of age; he had occupied the see of D—— since 1806.

Have courage for the great sorrows of life, and patience for the small ones. And when you have finished your daily task, go to sleep in peace. God is awake.

She had had sweet dreams, which possibly arose from the fact that her little bed was very white.

If no one loved, the sun would go out.

Though one believes in nothing, there are moments in life when one accepts the religion of the temple nearest at hand.

One becomes gradually accustomed to poison.

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.

First of all, I wish you love, and that by loving you may also be loved. But if it's not like that, be brief in forgetting And after you've forgotten, don't keep anything.

The fact is that the beautiful, humanly speaking, is merely form considered in its simplest aspect, in its most perfect symmetry, in its most entire harmony with our make-up. Thus the ensemble that it offers us is always complete, but restricted like ourselves. What we call the ugly, on the contrary, is a detail of a great whole which eludes us, and which is in harmony, not with man but with all creation. That is why it constantly presents itself to us in new but incomplete aspects.