Victor Hugo quotes - page 21

Success is a very hideous thing. Its false resemblance to merit deceives men. (Victor Hugo)
These are dark radiances. They have no suspicion that they are to be pitied. Certainly they are so. He who does not weep does not see. They are to be admired and pitied, as one would both pity and admire a being at once night and day, without eyes beneath his lashes but with a star on his brow. View quote
Victor Hugo
I'd rather be hissed at for a good verse, than applauded for a bad one. View quote
Victor Hugo
People do not read stupidities with impunity. View quote
Victor Hugo
She had had sweet dreams, which possibly arose from the fact that her little bed was very white. View quote
Victor Hugo
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. View quote
Victor Hugo
My misfortune is that I still resemble a man too much. I should liked to be wholly a beast like that goat. - Quasimodo. View quote
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. View quote
Victor Hugo
Philosophy should be an energy it should find its aim and its effect in the amelioration of mankind. View quote
Victor Hugo
Whenever a man's friends begin to compliment him about looking young, he may be sure that they think he is growing old. View quote
Victor Hugo
He caught her, she fell, he caught her in his arms, he held her tightly unconscious of what he was doing. He held her up, though tottering himself. He felt as if his head were filled with smoke; flashes of light slipped through his eyelids; his thoughts vanished; it seemed to him that he was performing a religious act, and that he was committing a profanation. Moreover, he did not feel one passionate desire for this ravishing woman, whose form he felt against his heart. He was lost in love. (Victor Hugo)
That men saw his mask, but the bishop saw his face. That men saw his life, but the bishop saw his conscience. View quote
Victor Hugo
My greatness does not extend to this shelf. View quote
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. View quote
Victor Hugo
In vain we chisel, as best we can, the mysterious block of which our life is made, the black vein of destiny reappears continually. View quote
Victor Hugo
Here we stop. On the threshold of wedding nights stands an angel smiling, a finger to his lips. View quote
Victor Hugo
You say, 'Where goest Thou' I cannot tell, And still go on. But if the way be straight I cannot go amiss before me lies Dawn and the day the night behind me that Suffices me I break the bounds I see, And nothing more believe and nothing less. My future is not one of my concerns. View quote
Victor Hugo
If we must suffer, let us suffer nobly. View quote
Victor Hugo
The soul does not give itself up to despair until it has exhausted all illusions. View quote
Victor Hugo
Whenever we encounter the Infinite in man, however imperfectly understood, we treat it with respect. Whether in the synagogue, the mosque, the pagoda, or the wigwam, there is a hideous aspect which we execrate and a sublime aspect which we venerate. So great a subject for spiritual contemplation, such measureless dreaming -- the echo of God on the human wall. View quote
Victor Hugo
We are on the side of religion as opposed to religions, and we are among those who believe in the wretched inadequacy of sermons and the sublimity of prayer. (Victor Hugo)
There exists, at the bottom of all abasement and misfortune, a last extreme which rebels and joins battle with the forces of law and respectability in a desperate struggle, waged partly by cunning and partly by violence, at once sick and ferocious, in which it attacks the prevailing social order with the pin-pricks of vice and the hammer-blows of crime. View quote
Victor Hugo
Desiring always to be in mourning, he clothed himself with night. View quote
Victor Hugo
If it were (Is it not) outrageous that society should treat with such rigid precision those of its members who were most poorly endowed in the distribution or wealth that chance had made, and who were, therefore, most worthy of indulgence. View quote
Victor Hugo
The book which the reader now holds in his hands, from one end to the other, as a whole and in its details, whatever gaps, exceptions, or weaknesses it may contain, treats of the advance from evil to good, from injustice to justice, from falsity to truth, from darkness to daylight, from blind appetite to conscience, from decay to life, from bestiality to duty, from Hell to Heaven, from limbo to God. Matter itself is the starting-point, and the point of arrival is the soul. Hydra at the beginning, an angel at the end. View quote
Victor Hugo