Victor Hugo - Les Misérables (1862)

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To destroy abuses is not enough; Habits must also be changed. The windmill has gone, but the wind is still there.

Victor Hugo
Let the one fight for his flag, and the other for his ideal, and let them both imagine that they are fighting for the country; the strife will be colossal.

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
There is a sacred horror about everything grand. It is easy to admire mediocrity and hills; but whatever is too lofty, a genius as well as a mountain, an assembly as well as a masterpiece, seen too near, is appalling.

Victor Hugo
Life, misfortune, isolation, abandonment, poverty, are battlefields which have their heroes; obscure heroes, sometimes greater than the illustrious heroes.

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
Give to a being the useless, and deprive him of the needful, and you have the gamin.

Victor Hugo
There is no vacuum in the human heart. Certain demolitions take place, and it is well that they do, but on condition that they are followed by reconstructions.

Victor Hugo
If you are leaving that sorrowful place with hate and anger against men, you are worthy of compassion; if you leave it with good will, gentleness and peace, you are better than any of us.

Victor Hugo
It was SHE. Whoever has loved knows all the radiant meaning contained in the three letters of this word 'she.

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

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
People weighed down with troubles do not look back; they know only too well that misfortune stalks them.

Victor Hugo
Diamonds are to be found only in the darkness of the earth, and truth in the darkness of the mind.

Victor Hugo
To meditate is to labour; to think is to act. Folded arms work, closed hands perform, a gaze fixed on heaven is a toil.

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
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
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
Children at once accept joy and happiness with quick familiarity, being themselves naturally all happiness and joy.

Victor Hugo
We should judge a man much more surely from what he dreams than from what he thinks.

Victor Hugo
A compliment is something like a kiss through a veil.

Victor Hugo
Mothers arms are made of tenderness, And sweet sleep blesses the child who lies therein.

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
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
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
Indigestion is charged by God with enforcing morality on the stomach.

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
Every bird that flies has the thread of the infinite in its claw.

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

Victor Hugo
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