Quotes from Victor Hugo

All is not at an end on earth since we can still talk nonsense.

See Monsieur Geborand, buying a pennyworth of paradise.

and if you fall as Lucifer fell, you fall in flames! And so it must be, for so it is written on the doorway to Paradise, that those who falter and those who fall must pay the price!

The soul has illusions as the bird has wings: it is supported by them.

France bleeds, but liberty smiles, and before the smile of liberty, France forgets her wound.

He was indulgent to women and to the poor, oppressed by the weight of society. The faults of women, children, and servants, he said, and of the weak, the poor and the ignorant, are the faults of husbands, fathers and masters, and of the strong, the rich and the learned. He also said: Teach the ignorant as much as you can. Society is to blame for not giving free education; it is responsible for the darkness it creates. The soul in darkness sins, but the real sinner is he who caused the darkness.

Scepticism, that dry caries of the intelligence.

He baptized his adopted child, and named him Quasimodo, either because he wished to mark in this way the day upon which the child was found, or because he wished to show by this name how imperfect and incomplete the poor little creature was. Indeed, Quasimodo, one eyed, hunchbacked, and knock kneed, was hardly more than half made.

All of us, whoever we may be, have our respirable beings. We lack air and we stifle. Then we die. To die for lack of love is horrible. Suffocation of the soul.

He had the confidence of a man who had never been wounded.

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

Let's not bring flame where light is enough.

To know how to distinguish the agitation arising from covetousness, from the agitation arising from principles, to fight the one and aid the other, in this lies the genius and the power of great revolutionary leaders.

Why was I not made of stone like thee? --Quasimodo[to a gargoyle on the ramparts of Notre Dame as Esmeralda rides off with Gringoire].

Wide horizons lead the soul to broad ideas; circumscribed horizons engender narrow ideas; this sometimes condemns great hearts to become small minded. Broad ideas hated by narrow ideas,—this is the very struggle of progress.

Progress is not accomplished in one stage.

In fact, he who has only beheld the misery of man has seen nothing; the misery of woman is what he must see; he who has seen only the misery of woman has seen nothing; he must see the misery of the child.

To love and be loved, that is the miracle of youth

They shall exist, and so long as society shall be what it is, they will be what they are. Under the dark vault of their cave, they are forever reproduced in the ooze. What is required to exorcise these goblins? Light. Light in floods. No bat resists the dawn. Illuminate society.

Quasimodo then lifted his eye to look upon the gypsy girl, whose body, suspended from the gibbet, he beheld quivering afar, under its white robes, in the last struggles of death; then again he dropped it upon the archdeacon, stretched a shapeless mass at the foot of the tower, and he said with a sob that heaved his deep breast to the bottom, 'Oh-all that I've ever loved!' The Hunchback of Notre Dame

Do we ever realize our fondest dreams?

But who among us is perfect? Even the greatest strategists have their eclipses, and the greatest blunders, like the thickest ropes, are often compounded of a multitude of strands. Take the rope apart, separate it into the small threads that compose it, and you can break them one by one. You think, 'That is all there was!' But twist them all together and you have something tremendous.

With a remainder of that brotherly compassion which is never totally absent from the heart of a drinker, Phoebus rolled Jehan with his foot onto one of those poor man's pillows which Providence provides on all the street corners of Paris and which the rich disdainfully refer to as heaps of garbage.

The oysters are spoiled, the servants are ugly. I hate humankind.