Quotes from Victor Hugo

Knowing that she was beautiful, she was thoroughly conscious, though in an indistinct fashion, that she possessed a weapon. Women play with their beauty as children do with a knife. They wound themselves.

Happy, even in the midst of anguish, is he to whom God has given a soul worthy of love and of unhappiness! He who has not viewed the things of this world and the heart of man under this double light has seen nothing and knows nothing of the true.

He always took his meals alone, with an open book before him, which he read.

To paint a battle requires those mighty artists with chaos in their brush

Table talk and amorous talk are equally impossible to grasp; amorous talk is all pretty bubbles, table talk, hot air.

He had enlightened Marius by chance and without being aware of the fact, as does a candle which some one brings; he had been the candle and not the some one.

He had but one word for both these kinds of toil; he called them gardening. The mind is a garden, said he.

Ah! my poor Bahorel, she is a superb girl, very literary, with tiny feet, little hands, she dresses well, and is white and dimpled, with the eyes of a fortune-teller. I am wild over her.

Blacheville smiles with the self-satisfied smugness of a man whose vanity is tickled

Questro libro è un dramma in cui il primo personaggio è l'infinito: l'uomo il secondo.

Jean Valjean felt his heart melt within him with delight, at all these sparks of a tenderness so exclusive, so wholly satisfied with himself alone. The poor man trembled, inundated with angelic joy; he declared to himself ecstatically that this would last all their lives; he told himself that he really had not suffered sufficiently to merit so radiant a bliss, and he thanked God, in the depths of his soul, for having permitted him to be loved thus, he, a wretch, by that innocent being.

Il y a une manière d'éviter qui ressemble à chercher.

Promise to give me a kiss on my brow when I am dead. --I shall feel it.

Mais où sont les neiges d'antan? But where are the snows of years gone by?

It is chiefly at the moment when there is the greatest need for attaching them to the painful realities of life, that the threads of thought snap within the brain.

The memory of an absent being kindles in the darkness of the heart; the more it has disappeared, the more it beams; the gloomy and despairing soul sees this light on its horizon; the star of the inner night.

The solitary man is a modified savage, accepted by civilization. He who wanders most is most alone; hence his continual change of place. To remain anywhere long, suffocated him with the sense of being tamed. He spent his life in moving on.

Une idée fixe aboutit à la folie ou à l'héroïsme.

Come fu che le loro labbra s'incontrarono? Come avviene che l'uccello canta, che la neve si scioglie, che la rosa sboccia, che maggio dà i suoi fiori, che l'alba imbianca dietro gli alberi neri le cime frementi delle colline? Un bacio, e fu tutto.

Si eres piedra, sé imán; si eres planta; sé sensitiva; si eres hombre, sé amor.

O mais belo altar – dizia – é a alma de um infeliz que agradece a Deus um benefício.

What are the convulsions of a city in comparison with the insurrections of the soul? Man is a depth still greater than the people.

Um pequeno jardim para passear e a imensidão para sonhar. A seus pés, o que se pode cultivar e colher; sobre sua cabeça, o que se pode meditar e estudar; algumas flores na terra e todas as estrelas no céu.

But logic ignores the more-or-less as absolutely as the sun ignores the candlelight.