Quotes from Victor Hugo

Should he remain in paradise and become a demon? Should he return to hell and become an angel?

Quant au mode de prier, peu importe le nom, pourvu qu'il soit sincère. Tournez votre livre à l'envers et soyez à l'infini As for how you pray, the words do not matter if they are sincere. Turn your prayer book upside down and face the infinite.

Monseigneur, you who turn everything to account have, nevertheless, one useless plot. It would be better to grow salads there than bouquets. Madame Magloire, retorted the Bishop, you are mistaken. The beautiful is as useful as the useful. He added after a pause, More so, perhaps.

The infinite space that each man carries within himself, wherein despairingly he contrasts the movement of his spirit with the acts of his life, is and overpowering thing.

This is one of those rare moments when, while doing that which it is one's duty to do, one feels something which disconcerts one, and which would dissuade one from proceeding further; one persists, it is necessary, but conscience, though satisfied, is sad, and the accomplishment of duty is complicated with a pain at the heart.

Whither will suffering lead me? To nothingness; but I shall have suffered. Whither will enjoyment lead me? To nothingness; but I shall have enjoyed myself.

The most beautiful of altars, he said, is the soul of an unhappy creature consoled and thanking God.

perfidious.

God decreed that the love which came to Cosette was a love that saves.

It is a false and dangerous situation which bases public power on private want, and roots the grandeur of the State in the suffering of the individual. It is a badly constituted grandeur which combines all the material elements, and into which no moral element enters.

Strong and rare natures are thus created; misery, almost always a stepmother, is sometimes a mother; privation gives birth to power of soul and mind; distress is the nurse of self-respect; misfortune is a good breast for great souls.

In days gone by, I stole a loaf of bread in order to live; to-day, in order to live, I will not steal a name.

There are men who work hard, digging for gold: he worked hard, digging for pity. The misery of the world was his mine. Pain everywhere was an occasion for goodness always.

He did not seek to assume the mantle of Elijah, to shed a light of the future upon the misty turmoil of events or resolve the prevailing light into a single flame; there was in him nothing of the prophet or the mystic. He was a simple soul who loved, and that was all.

The thinker who should turn aside from slang would resemble a surgeon who should avert his face from an ulcer or a wart. He would be like a philologist refusing to examine a fact in language, a philosopher hesitating to scrutinize a fact in humanity.

Progress is the goal, the ideal is the type. What is this ideal? It is God. Ideal, absolute, perfection, infinity: identical words.

I'm not in the world to guard my own life, but to guard souls

In the meantime, let us study things that are no more. It is necessary to know them, if only for the purpose of avoiding them. The counterfeits of the past assume false names, and gladly call themselves the future. This specter, this past, is given to falsifying its own passport. Let us inform ourselves of the trap. Let us be on our guard. The past has a visage, superstition, and a mask, hypocrisy. Let us denounce the visage and let us tear off the mask.

some even affirmed that they had passed the night across the threshold of the great door, in order to make sure that they should be the first to pass in. The crowd

Let us reflect, if we wish to be brilliant. Too much improvisation empties the mind in a stupid way. Running beer gathers no froth. No haste, gentlemen.

There are for each of us several parallelisms between our intelligence, our habits, and our character, which develop without a break, and break only in the great disturbances of life.

Time is greedy, man is greedier

It is an error to imagine that fate can be exhausted, and that one has reached the bottom of anything whatever.

The beautiful is as useful as the useful." He added after a moment's pause, "Perhaps more so.