Quotes from Victor Hugo

Woe, alas, to the one who shall have loved bodies, forms, appearances only. Death will take everything from him. Try to love souls, you shall find them again

He had to submit to the fate of every newcomer in a small town, where many tongues talk but few heads think.

Everything being a constant carnival, there is no carnival left.

Jean Valjean, my brother, you no longer belong to evil, but to good. It is your soul that I buy from you; I withdraw it from black thoughts and the spirit of perdition, and I give it to God.

Right is just and true.

But, reverend master, it is not sufficient to pass one's life, one must earn the means for life.

Nothing is more charming than the glow of happiness amid squalor. There is a rose-tinted attic in all our lives.

He seemed to say to Fate: You wouldn't dare.

He endeavored to collect his thoughts, but did not succeed. At those hours especially when we have sorest need of grasping the sharp realities of life do the threads of though snap off in the brain.

Monsieur Bienvenu was simply a man who accepted these mysterious questions...and who had in his soul a deep respect for the mystery which enveloped them.

That's life said the philosopher each time he was almost laid prostrate, It's often our best friends who make us fall

True history being a mixture of all things, the true historian mingles in everything.

Madame Magloire sometimes called him 'Your Highness.' One day, rising from his armchair, he went to his library for a book. It was on one of the upper shelves, and as the bishop was rather short, he could not reach it. 'Madame Magloire,' said he, 'bring me a chair. My highness cannot reach that shelf.

On the one side blind force, on the other a soul.

There is a point at which the unfortunate and the infamous are associated and confounded in a single word, a fatal word, Les Miserables.

Carve as we will the mysterious block of which our life is made, the black vein of destiny constantly reappears in it.

That's nice! You have called me Eponine!

Peace is happiness digesting

We may remain more or less open-minded on the subject of the death penalty, indisposed to commit ourselves, so long as we have not seen a guillotine with our own eyes.

Noise does not waken a drunkard; silence wakens him.

The child entered the hut. The old man followed him with his eyes, and added, as though speaking to himself: - I shall die while he sleeps. The two slumbers may be good neighbors.

I have a dream my life would be. So different from this hell I'm living. So different now from what it seem. Now life has killed the dream I dreamed. *Fantine

What a transfiguration it is to love! And the little shrieks, the pursuits in the grass, the waists encircled by stealth, the jargon that is melody, the adoration that breaks through in the way a syllable is said, those cherries snatched form one pair of lips by another - It all catches fire and turns into celestial glories.

The arms of mothers are made of tenderness; in them children sleep profoundly.