Quotes from Victor Hugo

Humanity is identity. All men are made of the same clay. No difference, here below at least, in predestination. The same darkness before, the same flesh during, the same ashes after. But when ignorance is mixed with human dough, it blackens it. This incurable blackness takes over man's insides and there turns into evil… Destroy the dark hold, Ignorance, and you destroy the mole, Crime.

What have we to fear, we who believe?

and when one says student, one says Parisian: to study in Paris is to be born in Paris.

Do what we may to shape the mysterious stuff of which our lives are composed, the dark threads of our destiny will always re-emerge.

It was said of him that he had once been for a short time in Bedlam; they had done him the honour to take him for a madman, but had set him free on discovering that he was only a poet. This story was probably not true; we have all to submit to some such legend about us.

So bring me this man, trembling and shivering from head to foot; let me fall into his arms or down at his knees; he will weep and we shall weep, he will be eloquent and I shall be comforted, and my heart shall melt into his, he will take my soul, and I his God. But what is this kindly old gentleman to me? And what am I to him? Just one more member of the race of unfortunates, one more shade to go with the many he has seen, one more figure to add to his total of executions.

A book is so soon made, costs so little, and may go so far! Why should we surprised that all human thought flows that way?

Who can be sure that Jean Valjean had not been on the verge of losing heart and giving up the struggle? In loving he recovered his strength. But the truth is that he was no less vulnerable than Cosette. He protected her and she sustained him. Thanks to him she could go forward into life, and thanks to her he could continue virtous. He was the child's support and she his mainstay. Sublime, unfathomable marvel of the balance of destiny!

C'est que l'amour est comme un arbre, il pousse de lui-même, jette profondément ses racines dans tout notre être, et continue souvent de verdoyer sur un cÅ"ur en ruines.   Et ce qu'il y a d'inexplicable, c'est que plus cette passion est aveugle, plus elle est tenace. Elle n'est jamais plus solide que lorsqu'elle n'a pas de raison en elle.  

To crush fanaticism and to venerate the infinite, such is the law. Let us not confine ourselves to prostrating ourselves before the tree of creation, and to the contemplation of its branches full of stars. We have a duty to labor over the human soul, to defend the mystery against the miracle, to adore the incomprehensible and reject the absurd, to admit, as an inexplicable fact, only what is necessary, to purify belief, to remove superstitions from above religion; to clear God of caterpillars.

Mankind is not a circle with a single centre but an ellipse with two focal points of which facts are one and ideas the other.

Whom man kill, God restores to life; whom the brothers pursue the Father redeems. Pray and believe and go onward into life. You Father is there.

La nada no existe. Cero no existe. Todo es algo. Nada es nada.

Examine the road over which the fault has passed. - Charles Francios Bienvenu Myriel

I understand only love and liberty.

The shock caused by the fall of a careless word displaces that against which it strikes. At times it happens, without our knowing why, that because we have received an almost imperceptible blow from a chance word, the heart insensibly empties itself of love. He who loves, perceives a decline in his happiness. There is nothing more to be dreaded than this slow exudation from the fissure in the vase.

L'homme a sur lui la chair, qui est tout à la fois son fardeau et sa tentation. Il la traîne et lui cède.

There are no trivial facts in humanity, nor little leaves in vegetation.

would go somewhere, we would seek that spot on earth, where the sun is brightest, the sky the bluest, where the trees are most luxuriant. We would love each other, we would pour our two souls into each other, and we would have a thirst for ourselves which we would quench in common and incessantly at that fountain of inexhaustible love. She interrupted with a terrible and thrilling laugh. Look, father, you have blood on your fingers!

Curiosity is a sort of gluttony. To see is to devour.

Be it said in passing, that success is a very hideous thing. Its false resemblance to merit deceives men.

Or, donner la grosse cloche en mariage à Quasimodo, c'était donner Juliette à Roméo.

To love your neighbors is to see the face of God. - Les Miserables

Enjolras caught glimpses of a luminous uprising under the dark skirts of the future.