Victor Hugo - Les Misérables (1862)

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Here we stop. On the threshold of wedding nights stands an angel smiling, a finger to his lips.

Victor Hugo
Teach the ignorant as much as you can; society is culpable in not providing a free education for all and it must answer for the night which it produces. If the soul is left in darkness sins will be committed. The guilty one is not he who commits the sin, but he who causes the darkness.

Victor Hugo
Diamonds are found only in the dark bowels of the earth; truths are found only in the depths of thought. It seemed to him that after descending into those depths after long groping in the blackest of this darkness, he had at last found one of these diamonds, one of these truths, and that he held it in his hand; and it blinded him to look at it.

Victor Hugo
Nihilism has no substance. There is no such thing as nothingness, and zero does not exist. Everything is something. Nothing is nothing.

Victor Hugo
She had had sweet dreams, which possibly arose from the fact that her little bed was very white.

Victor Hugo
Nobody knows like a woman how to say things that are both sweet and profound. Sweetness and depth, this is all of woman; this is Heaven.

Victor Hugo
While contemplating the bride, and eyeing the cake of soap, he muttered between his teeth: 'Tuesday. It was not Tuesday. Was it Tuesday? Perhaps it was Tuesday. Yes, it was Tuesday.' No one has ever discovered to what this monologue referred. Yes, perchance, this monologue had some connection with the last occasion on which he had dined, three days before, for it was now Friday.

Victor Hugo
The mountains, the forest, and the sea, render men savage; they develop the fierce, but yet do not destroy the human.

Victor Hugo
All roads are blocked to a philosophy which reduces everything to the word 'no.' To 'no' there is only one answer and that is 'yes.

Victor Hugo
The soul does not give itself up to despair until it has exhausted all illusions.

Victor Hugo
What is the cat?" he exclaimed. "It is a corrective. God, having made the mouse, said, 'I've made a blunder.' And he made the cat. The cat is the erratum of the mouse. The mouse, plus the cat, Is the revised and corrected proof of creation.

Victor Hugo
There is one spectacle grander than the sea, that is the sky; there is one spectacle grander than the sky, that is the interior of the soul.

Victor Hugo
In this way, his unhappy soul struggled with its anguish. Eighteen hundred years before this unfortunate man, the mysterious Being, in whom all the sanctities and all the sufferings of humanity come together, He too, while the olive trees trembled in the fierce breath of the Infinite, had brushed away the fearful cup that appeared before him, streaming with shadow and running over with darkness, in the star-filled depths.

Victor Hugo
She might have melted a heart of stone, but nothing can melt a heart of wood.

Victor Hugo
Work, which makes a man free, and thought, which makes him worthy of freedom.

Victor Hugo
She worked in order to live, and presently fell in love, also in order to live, for the heart, too, has its hunger.

Victor Hugo
M. Myriel had to undergo the fate of every newcomer in a little town, where there are many mouths which talk, and very few heads which think.

Victor Hugo
Take away time is money, and what is left of England? take away cotton is king, and what is left of America?

Victor Hugo
Have no fear of robbers or murderers. They are external dangers, petty dangers. We should fear ourselves. Prejudices are the real robbers; vices the real murderers. The great dangers are within us. Why worry about what threatens our heads or our purses? Let us think instead of what threatens our souls.

Victor Hugo
When we are at the end of life, to die means to go away; when we are at the beginning, to go away means to die.

Victor Hugo
Everybody has noticed the way cats stop and loiter in a half-open door. Hasn't everyone said to a cat: For heavens sake why don't you come in? With opportunity half-open in front of them, there are men who have a similar tendency to remain undecided between two solutions, at the risk of being crushed by fate abruptly closing the opportunity. The overprudent, cats as they are, and because they are cats, sometimes run more danger than the bold

Victor Hugo
Success is a very hideous thing. Its false resemblance to merit deceives men.

Victor Hugo
Nothing can be sadder or more profound than to see a thousand things for the first and last time.

Victor Hugo
The hatred of luxury is not an intelligent hatred. It implies a hatred of arts.

Victor Hugo
There is but one way of refusing Tomorrow, that is to die.

Victor Hugo