Victor Hugo - Les Misérables (1862)

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One can no more keep the mind from returning to an idea than the sea from returning to a shore. For a sailor, this is called the tide; in the case of the guilty it is called remorse. God stirs up the soul as well as the ocean.

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

Victor Hugo
A cannonball travels only two thousand miles an hour; light travels two hundred thousand miles a second. Such is the superiority of Jesus Christ over Napoleon.

Victor Hugo
Anger may be foolish and absurd, and one may be wrongly irritated, but a man never feels outraged unless in some respect he is fundamentally right.

Victor Hugo
In 1815, M. Charles-Francois-Bienvenu Myriel was Bishop of D—— He was an old man of about seventy-five years of age; he had occupied the see of D—— since 1806.

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
It all seemed to him to have disappeared as if behind a curtain at a theater. There are such curtains that drop in life. God is moving on to the next act.

Victor Hugo
For the rest, he was the same to all men, the fashionable world and the ordinary people. He judged nothing in haste, or without taking account of the cirumstances. He said, 'Let me see how the fault arose.

Victor Hugo
At a certain depth of distress, the poor, in their stupor, groan no longer over evil, and are no longer thankful for good.

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
At the hour of civilization through which we are now passing, and which is still so sombre, the miserable's name is Man; he is agonizing in all climes, and he is groaning in all languages.

Victor Hugo
Success is an ugly thing. Men are deceived by its false resemblances to merit.... They confound the brilliance of the firmament with the star-shaped footprints of a duck in the mud.

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

Victor Hugo
Upon the first goblet he read this inscription, monkey wine; upon the second, lion wine; upon the third, sheep wine; upon the fourth, swine wine. These four inscriptions expressed the four descending degrees of drunkenness: the first, that which enlivens; the second, that which irritates; the third, that which stupefies; finally the last, that which brutalizes.

Victor Hugo
Great perils have this beauty, that they bring to light the fraternity of strangers.

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

Victor Hugo
The realities of life do not allow themselves to be forgotten.

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

Victor Hugo
I didn't believe it could be so monstrous. It's wrong to be so absorbed in divine law as not to perceive human law. Death belongs to God alone. By what right do men tough that unknown thing?

Victor Hugo
To be wicked does not insure prosperity, for the inn did not succeed well.

Victor Hugo
Waterloo is a battle of the first rank won by a captain of the second.

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

Victor Hugo
Alas! to have risen does not prevent falling. We see this in history oftener than we would wish.

Victor Hugo
The sunshine was delightful, the foliage gently astir, more from the activity of birds than from the breeze. One gallant little bird, doubtless lovelorn, was singing his heart out at the top of a tall tree.

Victor Hugo
The most ferocious animals are disarmed by caresses to their young.

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
It is sad to tell, but after having tried society, which had caused his misfortune, he tried Providence which created society, and condemned it also.

Victor Hugo
It is the peculiarity of grief to bring out the childish side of man.

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