Browsing Quotes By Victor Hugo
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All the forces in the world are not so powerful as an idea whose time has come.
Speaker: Victor HugoPosted: 28 Jul 2009 at 11:27 PMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
It has been estimated that in ceremonial of this kind, salutes to royalty and other distinguished personages, the opening and closing of harbours, guns fired at daybreak and sunset from ships and fortresses throughout the civilized world, some 150,000 cannons are uselessly discharged every twenty-four hours. At six francs a time this amounts to 900,000 francs a day, or 300 millions a year. A detail in passing. Meanwhile the poor continue to die of hunger.
Speaker: Victor HugoSource: Les MiserablesPosted: 18 Mar 2009 at 8:17 PMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
'Monseigneur, I beseech you not to go. You will be risking your life.’
'Is that really all, Monsieur le Maire,’ said the bishop. 'I was not put into this world to preserve my life but to protect souls.’Speaker: Victor HugoSource: Les MiserablesPosted: 18 Mar 2009 at 8:14 PMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
We must never fear robbers or murderers. They are dangers from the outside, small dangers. It is ourselves we have to fear. Prejudice is the real robber, and vice the real murderer. Why should we be troubled by a threat to our person or our pocket? What we have to beware of is the threat to our souls.
...A priest must never speak to protect himself against other men. Men do as God allows them to do. We may only pray to Him when we feel ourselves to be in danger, and we must pray, not for ourselves but for our brother, lest through us he fall into sin.Speaker: Victor HugoSource: Les MiserablesPosted: 18 Mar 2009 at 8:11 PMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
The faults of women, children, and servants… and of the weak, the poor, and the ignorant, are the faults of the husbands, fathers, and masters, and of the strong, the rich, and the learned.
Speaker: Victor HugoSource: Les MiserablesPosted: 18 Mar 2009 at 8:06 PMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
There is a prospect greater than the sea, and it is the sky; there is a prospect greater than the sky, and it is the human soul.
To make a poem of the human conscience, even in terms of a single man and the least of men, would be to merge all epics in a single epic transcending all… To peer at certain moments into the withdrawn face of a human being in the act of reflection, to see something of what lies behind their outward silence, is to discern struggle on a Homeric scale, conflicts of dragons and hydras, aerial hosts as in Milton, towering vistas as in Dante. The infinite space that each man carries within himself, wherein despairingly he contrasts the movements of his spirit with the acts of his life, is an overpowering thing.Speaker: Victor HugoSource: Les MiserablesPosted: 18 Mar 2009 at 8:05 PMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
These are life’s delights. These momentary, happy pairings are a deep response to life and nature, a summons to warmth and light. There must once have been a good fairy who ordered the fields and trees expressly for young hearts, and thanks to her we have the eternal ecole buisonniere, that school for lovers under the sky that will endure as long as there are trees and novices.
...The lawyer’s clerk becomes a god. The cries and chasings in the grass, the clasped waist, the murmur of half-spoken words that are a song of rapture, the cherry passed from mouth to mouth, these like a flame rising and sinking are the heaven of life. Girls sweetly give themselves and believe that it will last forever. Philosophers, poets, and painters contemplate these ecstasies and cannot encompass them, so dazzled are they.Speaker: Victor HugoSource: Les MiserablesPosted: 18 Mar 2009 at 7:57 PMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
...Becoming in obscurity and through obscurity the star around which an angel gravitates – there are few felicities to equal this.
The supreme happiness in life is the assurance of being loved; of being loved for oneself, even in spite of oneself.Speaker: Victor HugoSource: Les MiserablesPosted: 18 Mar 2009 at 7:52 PMComments: None... Be the first to comment!