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Victor Hugo -
Les Misérables (1862)
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Napoleon... mighty somnambulist of a vanished dream.
Victor Hugo
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Monsieur' to a convict is a glass of water to a man dying of thirst at sea; ignominy thirsts for respect.
Victor Hugo
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A man is not idle because he is absorbed in thought. There is visible and invisible labor. To contemplate is to toil. To think is to do.
Victor Hugo
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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
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Children at once accept joy and happiness with quick familiarity, being themselves naturally all happiness and joy.
Victor Hugo
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We should judge a man much more surely from what he dreams than from what he thinks.
Victor Hugo
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A compliment is something like a kiss through a veil.
Victor Hugo
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Mothers arms are made of tenderness, And sweet sleep blesses the child who lies therein.
Victor Hugo
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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
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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
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With a tiny bit of effort, the nettle would be useful; if you neglect it, it becomes a pest. So then we kill it. How many men are like nettles My friends, there is no such thing as a weed and no such thing as a bad man. There are only bad cultivators.
Victor Hugo
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Indigestion is charged by God with enforcing morality on the stomach.
Victor Hugo
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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
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Every bird that flies has the thread of the infinite in its claw.
Victor Hugo
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Success is a very hideous thing. Its false resemblance to merit deceives men.
Victor Hugo
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Whether we be Italians or Frenchmen, misery concerns us all. Ever since history has been written, ever since philosophy has meditated, misery has been the garment of the human race; the moment has at length arrived for tearing off that rag, and for replacing, upon the naked limbs of the Man-People, the sinister fragment of the past with the grand purple robe of the dawn.
Victor Hugo
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The convent, which belongs to the West as it does to the East, to antiquity as it does to the present time, to Buddhism and Muhammadanism as it does to Christianity, is one of the optical devices whereby man gains a glimpse of infinity.
Victor Hugo
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Daring is the price of progress. All splendid conquests are the prize of boldness, more or less.
Victor Hugo
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It seemed to be a necessary ritual that he should prepare himself for sleep by meditating under the solemnity of the night sky... a mysterious transaction between the infinity of the soul and the infinity of the universe.
Victor Hugo
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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
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The beautiful is as useful as the useful." He added after a moment's silence, "Perhaps more so.
Victor Hugo
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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?
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Human thought has no limit. At its risk and peril, it analyzes and dissects its own fascination. We could almost say that, by a sort of splendid reaction, it fascinates nature; the mysterious world surrounding us returns what it receives; it is likely that contemplators are contemplated.
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You look at a star for two reasons, because it is luminous, and because it is impenetrable. You have beside you a sweeter radiance and a greater mystery, woman.
Victor Hugo
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Be it true or false, what is said about men often has as much influence upon their lives, and especially upon their destinies, as what they do.
Victor Hugo
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Quote of the day
Time and trouble will tame an advanced young woman, but an advanced old woman is uncontrollable by any earthly force.
Dorothy L. Sayers
Victor Hugo
Creative Commons
Born:
February 26, 1802
Died:
May 22, 1885
(aged 83)
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