Quotes from Victor Hugo

This exists. It can be seen. It can be touched. These in pace, these dungeons, these iron hinges, these necklets, that lofty peep-hole on a level with the river's current, that box of stone closed with a lid of granite like a tomb, with this difference, that the dead man here was a living being, that soil which is but mud, that vault hole, those oozing walls, --what declaimers!

The crowd mistrusts the allurement of paladins. The masses, ponderous bodies that they are, and fragile on account of their very heaviness, fear adventure; and there is adventure in the ideal.

Large sums passed through his hands. Nevertheless, nothing changed his way of life or added the slightest luxury to his simple life. Quite the contrary, As there is always more misery at the lower end than humanity at the top, everything was given away before it was received, like water on parched soil. No matter how much money came to him, he never had enough. And then he robbed himself.

Good thoughts have their abysses as well as evil ones.

My friends, remember this: There are no bad herbs, and no bad men; there are only bad cultivators.

A frightful exchange of metaphors took place between the maskers and the crowd.

This book is a drama, whose leading personage is the Infinite.

Doing nothing is happiness for children and misery for old men.

I am come to warn you. I am come to impeach your happiness. It is fashioned out of the misery of your neighbour. You have everything, and that is composed of the nothing of others… As for me, I am but a voice. Mankind is a mouth, of which I am the cry. You shall hear me!

There is, we are aware, a philosophy that denies the infinite. There is also a philosophy, classified as pathologic, that denies the sun; this philosophy is called blindness.

He sleeps although so much he was denied. He lived and when his dear love left him died. It happened of itself, in the easy way that in the morning night time follows day

Succeed; that is the advice that falls, drop by drop, from the overhanging fruit of corruption.

L'amour n'a point de moyen terme; ou il perd, ou il sauve.

The judge speaks in the name of justice,' he said. 'The priest speaks in the name of pity, which is only a higher form of justice.' (Bishop Myriel)

The night was starless and very dark. Without doubt, in the gloom some mighty angel was standing, with outstretched wings, awaiting the soul.

Ceci tuera cela

He was troubled; this brain, so limpid in its blindness, had lost its transparency; there was a cloud in this crystal.

Those are rare who fall without becoming degraded; there is a point, moreover, at which the unfortunate and the infamous are associated and confounded in a single word, a fatal word, Les Misérables.

A miscreant with coiffed, scented hair, a slender waist, the hips of a woman and the chest of a Prussian officer, with a finely tied cravat, by all girls admired. ~ [introduction of character Montparnasse]

I wanted to see you again, touch you, know who you were, see if I would find you identical with the ideal image of you which had remained with me and perhaps shatter my dream with the aid of reality.

There are no bad plants or bad men. There is only bad husbandry.

What is history? An echo of the past in the future; a reflex from the future on the past.

it is very easy to be kind; the difficulty lies in being just.

C'est une étrange prétention des hommes de vouloir que l'amour conduise quelque part