Quotes by Victor Hugo

Do you hear the people sing? Singing a song of angry men

There were corpses here and there and pools of blood. I remember seeing a butterfly flutter up and down that street. Summer does not abdicate.

The driver, a black silhouette upon his box, whipped up his bony horses. Icy silence in the coach. Marius, motionless, his body braced in the corner of the carriage, his head dropping down upon his breast, his arms hanging, his legs rigid, appeared to await nothing now but a coffin; Jean Valjean seemed made of shadow, and Javert of stone.

a mother who loses her child can no longer believe in God

Progress is not accomplished in one stage.

It is one of the poignant anxieties of the thinker that he sees the shadow resting on the human soul, and that he gropes in darkness without being able to awaken that slumbering Progress.

It is one of the poignant anxieties of the thinker that he sees the shadow resting on the human soul, and that he gropes in darkness without being able to awake that slumbering Progress.

Night sometimes lends such tragic assistance to catastrophe.

Every bird that flies has the thread of the infinite in its claw.

No one is a good historian of the patent, visible, striking, and public life of peoples, if he is not, at the same time, in a certain measure, the historian of their deep and hidden life; and no one is a good historian of the interior unless he understands how, at need, to be the historian of the exterior also...True history being a mixture of all things, the true historian mingles in everything.

People who are overwhelmed with troubles never do look back.They know only too well that misfortune follows in their wake.

For a persons nature,like a rock,can be drilled into by drops of water.For a persons nature,like a rock,can be drilled into by drops of water.For a persons nature,like a rock,can be drilled into by drops of water.For a persons nature,like a rock,can be drilled into by drops of water.

There is, we are aware, a philosophy that denies the infinite. There is also a philosophy, classified as pathologic, that denies the sun; this philosophy is called blindness. To set up a theory that lacks a source of truth is an excellent example of blind assurance. And the odd part of it is the haughty air of superiority and compassion assumed toward the philosophy that sees God, by this philosophy that has to grope its way. It makes one think of a mole exclaiming, How I pity them with their sun! There are, we know, illustrious and powerful atheists; with them, the matter is nothing but a question of definitions, and at all events, even if they do not believe in God, they prove God, because they are great minds. We hail, in them, the philosophers, while, at the same time, inexorably disputing their philosophy.

The life of the cenobite is a human problem. When we speak of convents, those seats of error but innocence, of mistaken views but good intentions, of ignorance but devotion, of torment but martyrdom, we must nearly always say yes or no...The monastery is a renunciation. Self-sacrifice, even when misdirected, is still self-sacrifice. To assume as duty a strict error has its peculiar grandeur.

God will reward you, he said. You must be an angel since you care for flowers.

The night was starless and very dark. Without doubt, in the gloom some mighty angel was standing, with outstretched wings, awaiting the soul.

Hatred becomes, within a given time, the hatred of society, then the hatred of the human race, then the hatred of creation.

There is a sacred horror about everything grand. It is easy to admire mediocrity and hills; but whatever is too lofty, a genius as well as a mountain, an assembly as well as a masterpiece, seen too near, is appalling. Every summit seems an exaggeration. Climbing wearies. The steepnesses take away ones breath; we slip on the slopes, we are hurt by the sharp points which are its beauty; the foaming torrents betray the precipices, clouds hide the mountain tops; mounting is full of terror, as well as a fall. Hence, there is more dismay than admiration. People have a strange feeling of aversion to anything grand. They see abysses, they do not see sublimity; they see the monster, they do not see the prodigy.

Everyone has noticed the taste which cats have for pausing and lounging between the two leaves of a half-shut door. Who is there who has not said to a cat, “Do come in!” There are men who, when an incident stands half-open before them, have the same tendency to halt in indecision between two resolutions, at the risk of getting crushed through the abrupt closing of the adventure by fate. The over-prudent, cats as they are, and because they are cats, sometimes incur more danger than the audacious.

There are moments when a ropes end, a pole, the branch of the tree, is life itself, and it is a frightful thing to see a living being lose his hold upon it, and fall like a ripe fruit.