Quotes from Victor Hugo

Tal es la explicación de la guerra, que es algo que lleva a cabo la humanidad contra la humanidad pese a la humanidad.

Man is not a circle with a single centre; he is an ellipse with a double focus. Facts form one of these, and ideas the other.

The bowed frame of an old man is the settlement in the architecture of life. Nature had formed him for sadness.

Sublime characters are stubborn.

C'è gente che pagherebbe per vendersi.

The supreme happiness of life consists in the conviction that one is loved; loved for one's own sake—let us say rather, loved in spite of one's self;

True, I tore the drapery from the altar; but it was to dress the wounds of the country.

The beautiful is just as useful as the useful.

No temamos nunca a los ladrones ni a los asesinos. Temamonos a nosotros mismos, porque los grandes peligros se encuentran dentro de nosotros

After he had fully determined that the young man was at the bottom of this state of affairs, and that it all came from him, he Jean Valjean, the regenerated man, the man who had laboured so much upon his soul, the man who had made so many efforts to resolve all life, all misery, and all misfortune into love; he looked within himself, and there he saw a spectre, Hatred.

But what was tragic about the girl was that she had not been born ugly. She might even have been a pretty child, and the grace proper to her age was still at odds with the repulsive premature aging induced by loose living and poverty. A trace of beauty still lingered in the sixteen-year-old face, like pale sunlight fading beneath the massed clouds of a winter's dawn.

Waterloo is the hinge of the nineteenth century. The disappearance of the great man was necessary to the advent of the great century. Some one, a person to whom one replies not, took the responsibility on himself. The panic of heroes can be explained. In the battle of Waterloo there is something more than a cloud, there is something of the meteor.

the highest monuments of human civilization accept its ironies and lend their eternity to its mischievous pranks.

Tempus edax homo edacior; which I willingly thus translate; Time is blind, man is stupid.

He visited the poor so long as he had any money; when he no longer had any, he visited the rich.

to all those unfortunate men who are widowers, I throw the sublime proclamation of Bonaparte to the army of Italy: Soldiers, you are in need of everything; the enemy has it.

Pierce through the livid face of a human being at certain moments as they ponder, look behind the facade, look into the soul, look into the darkness. There, beneath the outer silence, titanic struggles are taking place. What a somber thing is this infinity that each man carries within him and against which he measures in despair what his his brain wants and what his life puts into action!

Initiative is doing the right thing without being told.

The provincial dandy wore the longest of spurs and the fiercest of mustaches.

Do not inquire the name of him who asks a shelter of you. The very man who is embarrassed by his name is the one who needs shelter.

Napoleon was accustomed to gaze steadily at war; he never added up the heart-rending details, cipher by cipher; ciphers mattered little to him, provided that they furnished the total, victory; he was not alarmed if the beginnings did go astray, since he thought himself the master and the possessor at the end; he knew how to wait, supposing himself to be out of the question, and he treated destiny as his equal: he seemed to say to fate, Thou wilt not dare.

Does not this comprehend all, in fact? and what is there left to desire beyond it? A little garden in which to walk, and immensity in which to dream. At one's feet that which can be cultivated and plucked; over head that which one can study and meditate upon: some flowers on earth, and all the stars in the sky.

A certain amount of tempest is always mingled with a battle. Quid obscurum, quid divinum. Each historian traces, to some extent, the particular feature which pleases him amid this pell-mell.

and after all in this house what have we to fear? There is always someone with us who is stronger. The devil may visit us, but God lives here.