Victor Hugo - Les Misérables (1862)

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Nations, like stars, are entitled to eclipse. All is well, provided the light returns and the eclipse does not become endless night. Dawn and resurrection are synonymous. The reappearance of the light is the same as the survival of the soul.

Victor Hugo
There is always more misery among the lower classes than there is humanity in the higher.

Victor Hugo
Often when we think we are knotting one thread, we are tying quite another.

Victor Hugo
Not seeing people allows you to think of them as perfect in all kinds of ways.

Victor Hugo
When grace is joined with wrinkles, it is adorable. There is an unspeakable dawn in happy old age.

Victor Hugo
I'd like a drink. I desire to forget life. Life is a hideous invention by somebody I don't know. It doesn't last, and it's good for nothing. You break your neck simply living.

Victor Hugo
M. Mabeuf's political opinion was a passionate fondness for plants, and a still greater one for books. He had, like everybody else, his termination in ist, without which nobody could have lived in those times, but he was neither a royalist, nor a Bonapartist, nor a chartist, nor an Orleanist, nor an anarchist; he was an old-bookist.

Victor Hugo
Women play with their beauty as children do with their knives. They wound themselves with it.

Victor Hugo
Mirrors, those revealers of the truth, are hated; that does not prevent them from being of use.

Victor Hugo
Table talk and lovers' talk equally elude the grasp; lovers' talk is clouds, table talk is smoke.

Victor Hugo
That is the explanation of war, an outrage by humanity upon humanity in despite of humanity.

Victor Hugo
A mother's arms are made of tenderness, and children sleep soundly in them.

Victor Hugo
A little girl without a doll is almost as unhappy, and quite as impossible, as a woman without children." from chapter VIII of Les Miserables

Victor Hugo
The peculiarity of sunrise is to make us laugh at all our terrors of the night, and our laugh is always proportioned to the fear we have had.

Victor Hugo
Algebra is applied to the clouds, the irradiation of the planet benefits the rose, and no thinker would dare to say that the perfume of the hawthorn is useless to the constellation.

Victor Hugo
One can no more prevent the mind from returning to an idea than the sea from returning to a shore. In the case of the sailor, this is called a tide; in the case of the guilty, it is called remorse.

Victor Hugo
The truth of an upright man must be accepted on his own terms. Moreover, since natures vary, we must agree that all the beauties of human excellence may be fostered by faiths that we do not share.

Victor Hugo
So long as ignorance and poverty exist on earth, books of the nature of Les Miserables cannot fail to be of use.

Victor Hugo
There are people who observe the rules of honour as we observe the stars, from afar off.

Victor Hugo
The power of a glance has been so much abused in love stories, that it has come to be disbelieved in. Few people dare now to say that two beings have fallen in love because they have looked at each other. Yet it is in this way that love begins, and in this way only.

Victor Hugo
Do not ask the name of the person who seeks a bed for the night. He who is reluctant to give his name is the one who most needs shelter.

Victor Hugo
To lie a little is not possible: he who lies, lies the whole lie.

Victor Hugo
Man is not a circle with a single centre; he is an ellipse with two foci. Facts are one, ideas are the other.

Victor Hugo
The guillotine is the ultimate expression of Law, and its name is vengeance; it is not neutral, nor does it allow us to remain neutral.

Victor Hugo
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.

Victor Hugo