Victor Hugo - Les Misérables (1862)

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That men saw his mask, but the bishop saw his face. That men saw his life, but the bishop saw his conscience.

Victor Hugo
The straight line, a respectable optical illusion which ruins many a man.

Victor Hugo
Sometimes he used a spade in his garden, and sometimes he read and wrote. He had but one name for these two kinds of labor; he called them gardening. 'The Spirit is a garden,' said he

Victor Hugo
Thus, during those nineteen years of torture and slavery, did this soul rise and fall at the same time. Light entered on the one side, and darkness on the other.

Victor Hugo
There are thoughts which are prayers. There are moments when, whatever the posture of the body, the soul is on its knees.

Victor Hugo
Life, misfortune, isolation, abandonment, poverty, are battlefields which have their heroes; obscure heroes, sometimes greater than the illustrious heroes.

Victor Hugo
Often the losing of a battle leads to the winning of progress. Less glory but greater liberty: the drum is silent and the voices of reason can be heard.

Victor Hugo
There are many tongues to talk, and but few heads to think.

Victor Hugo
Let us study things that are no more. It is necessary to understand them, if only to avoid them.

Victor Hugo
A smile is the same as sunshine; it banishes winter from the human countenance.

Victor Hugo
The soul helps the body, and at certain moments raises it. It is the only bird that sustains its cage.

Victor Hugo
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.

Victor Hugo
If she gives me all her time it is because I have all her heart.

Victor Hugo
Everything being a constant carnival, there is no carnival left.

Victor Hugo
Monsieur' to a convict is a glass of water to a man dying of thirst at sea; ignominy thirsts for respect.

Victor Hugo
For prying into any human affairs, none are equal to those whom it does not concern.

Victor Hugo
We say and exclaim within ourselves without breaking silence, in a tumult where everything speaks except our mouths. The realities of the soul are none the less real for being invisible and impalpable.

Victor Hugo
There is a point when the unfortunate and the infamous are associated and confused in a word, a mortal word, les miserables

Victor Hugo
It was SHE. Whoever has loved knows all the radiant meaning contained in the three letters of this word 'she.

Victor Hugo
Such is the remorseless progression of human society, shedding lives and souls as it goes on its way. It is an ocean into which men sink who have been cast out by the law and consigned, with help most cruelly withheld, to moral death. The sea is the pitiless social darkness into which the penal system casts those it has condemned, an unfathomable waste of misery. The human soul, lost in those depths, may become a corpse. Who shall revive it?

Victor Hugo
From the oyster to the eagle, from the swine to the tiger, all animals are to be found in men and each of them exists in some man, sometimes several at a time. Animals are nothing but the portrayal of our virtues and vices made manifest to our eyes, the visible reflections of our souls. God displays them to us to give us food for thought.

Victor Hugo
The supreme ordeal, let us say rather, the only ordeal, is the loss of the beloved being.

Victor Hugo
Nothing is more dangerous than discontinued labor; it is habit lost. A habit easy to abandon, difficult to resume.

Victor Hugo
There is no vacuum in the human heart. Certain demolitions take place, and it is well that they do, but on condition that they are followed by reconstructions.

Victor Hugo
I am not in the world to care for my life, but for souls.

Victor Hugo