Victor Hugo - Les Misérables (1862)

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Love, thine is the future. Death, I use thee, but I hate thee. Citizens, there shall be in the future neither darkness nor thunderbolts; neither ferocious ignorance nor blood for blood.

Victor Hugo
The peasants of the Asturias believe that in every litter of wolves there is one pup that is killed by the mother for fear that on growing up it would devour the other little ones.

Victor Hugo
To know how to distinguish the agitation arising from covetousness, from the agitation arising from principles, to fight the one and aid the other, in this lies the genius and the power of great revolutionary leaders.

Victor Hugo
Have but luck, and you will have the rest; be fortunate, and you will be thought great.

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
No matter who you are, the thought of so much suffering and degradation must cause you to shudder at the sight of a veil or cassock, those two shrouds of human invention.

Victor Hugo
The beginning as well as the end of all his thoughts was hatred of human law, that hatred which, if it be not checked in its growth by some providential event, becomes, in a certain time, hatred of society, then hatred of the human race, and then hatred of creation, and reveals itself by a vague and incessant desire to injure some living being, it matters not who.

Victor Hugo
The supreme happiness of life is the conviction that we are loved.

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
His universal compassion was due less to natural instinct, than to a profound conviction, a sum of thoughts that in the course of living had filtered through to his heart: for in the nature of man, as in rock, there may be channels hollowed by the dropping of water, and these can never be destroyed.

Victor Hugo
Poor mothers, he thought. There is one thing sadder than to see their children die: to see them lead evil lives.

Victor Hugo
What is called honors and dignities, and even honor and dignity, is generally fool's gold.

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

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
A benevolent malefactor, merciful, gentle, helpful, clement, a convict, returning good for evil, giving back pardon for hatred, preferring pity to vengeance, preferring to ruin himself rather than to ruin his enemy, saving him who had smitten him, kneeling on the heights of virtue, more nearly akin to an angel than to a man. Javert was constrained to admit to himself that this monster existed. Things could not go on in this manner.

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

Victor Hugo
He sleeps. Although his fate was very strange, he lived. He died when he had no longer his angel. The thing came to pass simply, of itself, as the night comes when day is gone.

Victor Hugo
A doctor's door should never be closed, a priest's door should always be open.

Victor Hugo
Do not economize on the hymeneal rites; do not prune them of their splendor, nor split farthings on the day when you are radiant. A wedding is not house-keeping.

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

Victor Hugo
Who can calculate the passage of a particle?

Victor Hugo
Work is the law of life, and to reject it as boredom is to submit to it as torment.

Victor Hugo
A tempest ceases, a cyclone passes over, a wind dies down, a broken mast can be replaced, a leak can be stopped, a fire extinguished, but what will become of this enormous brute of bronze?

Victor Hugo
Death has a way of its own of harassing victory, and it causes pestilence to follow glory. Typhus is an annex of triumph.

Victor Hugo