Quotes from Victor Hugo

Ser un santo es la excepción; ser un justo es la regla. Equivocaos, desfalleced, pecad, pero sed justos.

with the exception of wars of liberation, everything that armies do is by foul means.

Jean Valjean opened his eyes wide, and stared at the venerable Bishop with an expression which no human tongue can render any account of.

En la noche hay lo absoluto; en las tinieblas lo múltiple. La gramática, esta lógica no admite singular para las tinieblas, la noche es una, las tinieblas son varias.

What is admirable in the clash of young minds is that no one can foresee the spark that sets off an explosion or predict what kind of explosion it will be.

Facts are sometimes like a hailstorm. They bombard you; they deafen you.

The doll is one of the most imperious needs and, at the same time, one of the most charming instincts of feminine childhood. To care for, to clothe, to deck, to dress, to undress, to redress, to teach, scold a little, to rock, to dandle, to lull to sleep, to imagine that something is some one,-therein lies the whole woman's future.

the secret associations, the schools, in the name of principles, and the middle classes, in the name of interests, were approaching preparatory to dashing themselves together

Venerate the man, whoever he may be, who has this sign—the starry eye.

It has been said, error is human; I say, error is love.

That it was no doubt a dark hour, but that he should get through it; that after all he held his destiny, evil as it might be, in his own hand; that he was master of it. He clung to that thought.

But for the matter of that, Ursus, although eccentric in manner and disposition, was too good a fellow to invoke or disperse hail, to make faces appear, to kill a man with the torment of excessive dancing, to suggest dreams fair or foul and full of terror, and to cause the birth of cocks with four wings. He had no such mischievous tricks.

He asked himself... whether it was not outrageous for society to treat thus precisely those of its members who were the least well endowed in the division of goods made by chance, and consequently the most deserving of consideration.

our judgement of a man would be much sounder were it based on what he dreams rather than on what he thinks.

and there comes a point, moreover, where the unfortunate and the infamous are grouped together, merged in a single, fateful word. They are les misérables– the outcasts, the underdogs.

The reader has, no doubt, already divined that M. Madeleine is no other than Jean Valjean.

était bien fait de sa personne, quoique d'assez petite

La tolerancia es la mejor religión

for men felt therein the presence of that great human thing which is called law, and that great divine thing which is called justice.

The only social peril is darkness.

It is our conviction that if souls were visible to the eyes, we should be able to see distinctly that strange thing that each one individual of the human race corresponds to some one of the species of the animal creation; and we could easily recognize this truth, hardly perceived by the thinker, that from the oyster to the eagle, from the pig to the tiger, all animals exist in man, and that each one of them is in a man. Sometimes even several of them at a time.

The hospital was a low and narrow building of a single story, with a small garden.

October, 1815, he was released; he had entered there in 1796, for having broken a pane of glass and taken a loaf of bread. Room

this man accepted everything, excused everything, forgave everything, blessed everything, welcomed everything, and asked of Providence, of men, of justice, of society, of nature, of the world, one thing only—that Cosette love him!