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For true poetry, complete poetry, consists in the harmony of contraries. Hence, it is time to say aloud--and it is here above allthat exceptions prove the rule--that everything that exists in nature exists in art.
Victor Hugo
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Primitive times are lyrical, ancient times epical, modern times dramatic. The ode sings of eternity, the epic imparts solemnity tohistory, the drama depicts life. The characteristic of the first poetry is ingeniousness, of the second, simplicity, of the third, truth.
Victor Hugo
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He who is not master of his own thoughts is not accountable for his own deeds.
Victor Hugo
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One of the hardest labours of the just man is to expunge from his soul a malevolence which it is difficult to efface.
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To see so much misery everywhere, I suspect that God is not rich. He keeps up appearances, it is true, but I feel the pinch. He gives a revolution as a merchant, whose credit is low, gives a ball.
Victor Hugo
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Work is the law of life, and to reject it as boredom is to submit to it as torment.
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God in his harmony has equal ends
For cedar that resists and reed that bends;
For good it is a woman sometimes rules,
Holds in her hand the power, and manners, schools,
And laws, and mind; succeeding master proud,
With gentle voice and smiles she leads the crowd,
The somber human troop.
Victor Hugo
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An astronomer is a sort of police constable of the heavens. The observatory is but a sentry box.
Victor Hugo
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Do not economize on the hymeneal rites; do not prune them of their splendor, nor split farthings on the day when you are radiant. A wedding is not house-keeping.
Victor Hugo
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The earlier works of a man of genius are always preferred to the newer ones, in order to prove that he is going down instead of up.
Victor Hugo
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Does not beauty confer a benefit upon us, even by the simple fact of being beautiful?
Victor Hugo
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Every fact is a logarithm; one added term ramifies it until it is thoroughly transformed. In the general aspect of things, the great lines of creation take shape and arrange themselves into groups; beneath lies the unfathomable.
Victor Hugo
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Chance, if such a thing exists, is far-seeing.
Victor Hugo
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Death has a way of its own of harassing victory, and it causes pestilence to follow glory. Typhus is an annex of triumph.
Victor Hugo
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Cuvier, with one eye on Genesis and the other on nature, was striving to please the bigoted reaction by placing fossils in harmony with texts, and letting Moses be flattered by the Mastodons.
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To gaze into the depths of the sea is, in the imagination, like beholding the vast unknown, and from its most terrible point of view. The submarine gulf is analogous to the realm of night and dreams. There also is sleep, unconsciousness, or at least apparent unconsciousness, of creation. There in the awful silence and darkness, the rude first forms of life, phantomlike, demoniacal, pursue their horrible instincts.
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The water is supple because it is incompressible. It glides away from under the effort. Borne down on one side, it escapes on the other. It is thus that the water becomes a wave. The wave is its liberty.
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Those who pray always are necessary to those who never pray. In our view, the whole question is in the amount of thought that is mingled with prayer.
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One microscopic glittering point; then another; and another, and still another; they are scarcely perceptible, yet they are enormous. This light is a focus; this focus, a star; this star, a sun; this sun, a universe; this universe, nothing. Every number is zero in the presence of the infinite.
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A library implies an act of faith which generations, still in darkness hid, sign in their night in witness of the dawn.
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Wonderful nature has a double meaning, which dazzles great minds and blinds uncultivated souls. When man is ignorant, when the desert is filled with visions, the darkness of solitude is added to the darkness of intelligence; hence, in man, the possibilities of perdition
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As for the bishop, the sight of the guillotine was a great shock to him, from which he recovered only slowly.
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Claude - saddened, his faith in human affection shaken - threw himself with frenzied ardour into the arms of science, that sister who at least never laughs at you in derision, and who always repays you, albeit at times in somewhat light coin, for the care you have lavished on her.
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These Greek capitals, black with age, and quite deeply graven in the stone, with I know not what signs peculiar to Gothic calligraphy imprinted upon their forms and upon their attitudes, as though with the purpose of revealing that it had been a hand of the Middle Ages which had inscribed them there, and especially the fatal and melancholy meaning contained in them, struck the author deeply.
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No matter who you are, the thought of so much suffering and degradation must cause you to shudder at the sight of a veil or cassock, those two shrouds of human invention.
Victor Hugo
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Quote of the day
Life is not having been told that the man has just waxed the floor.
Ogden Nash
Victor Hugo
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Born:
February 26, 1802
Died:
May 22, 1885
(aged 83)
Bio:
Victor Marie Hugo was a French poet, novelist, and dramatist of the Romantic movement. He is considered one of the greatest and best-known French writers.
Known for:
The Hunchback of Notre-Dame (1831)
Les Misérables (1862)
The Man Who Laughs (1869)
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