Victor Hugo
Marius was of the temperament that sinks into grief and remains there; Cosette was of the sort that plunges in and comes out again.Collection: Grief
His judgement demonstrates that one can be a genius and understand nothing of an art that is not one's own.Collection: Art
These two beings, who had loved each other so exclusively, and with so touching a love, and who had lived so long for each other, were now suffering beside one another and through one another; without speaking of it, without harsh feeling, and smiling all the while.Collection: Two
We say and exclaim within ourselves without breaking silence, in a tumult where everything speaks except our mouths. The realities of the soul are none the less real for being invisible and impalpable.Collection: Real
There is no distress so complete but that even in the most critical moments the inexplicable sunrise of hope is seen in its depths.Collection: Sunrise
He left her. She was dissatisfied with him. He had preferred to incur her anger rather than cause her pain. He had kept all the pain for himself.Collection: Pain
The mind's eye can nowhere find anything more dazzling or more dark than in man; it can fix itself upon nothing which is more awful, more complex, more mysterious, or more infinite. 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.Collection: Eye
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.Collection: Religious
In the opera we call love, the libretto is almost nothing.Collection: Opera
There are people who observe the rules of honor as one observes the stars, from a great distance.Collection: Stars
I am in the night. There is a being who has gone away and carried the heavens with her. Oh! to be laid side by side in the same tomb, hand clasped in hand, and from time to time, in the darkness, to caress a finger gently, that would suffice for my eternity.Collection: Love
The guillotine is the ultimate expression of Law, and its name is vengeance; it is not neutral, nor does it allow us to remain neutral.Collection: Expression
And if it happened to be a Christmas-night when the great bell seemed to rattle in its throat as it called the faithful to the midnight mass, there was such an indescribable air of life spread over the sombre facade that the great door-way looked as if it were swallowing the entire crowd, and the rose-window staring at them.Collection: Christmas
At that moment of love, a moment when passion is absolutely silent under omnipotence of ecstasy, Marius, pure seraphic Marius, would have been more capable of visiting a woman of the streets than of raising Cosette’s dress above the ankle. Once on a moonlit night, Cosette stopped to pick up something from the ground, her dress loosened and revealed the swelling of her breasts. Marius averted his eyes.Collection: Eye
The eye of a man should be still more reverent before the rising of a young maiden than before the rising of a star. The possibility of touch should increase respect. The down of the peach, the dust of the plum, the radiated crystal of snow, the butterfly’s wing powdered with feathers, are gross things beside that chastity that does not even know it is chaste. The young maiden is only the glimmer of a dream and is not yet statue. Her alcove is hidden in the shadows of the ideal. The indiscreet touch of the eye desecrates this dim penumbra. Here, to gaze, is to profane.Collection: Dream
Here we stop. Upon the threshold of wedding nights stands an angel smiling, his finger on his lip.Collection: Angel
[T]he small is great, the great is small; all is in equilibrium in necessity.Collection: Science
Let us leave to the brain what belongs to it, and agree that the work of the men of genius is of the superhuman, the offspring of man.Collection: Wisdom
To be wicked does not insure prosperity - for the inn did not succeed well.Collection: Wisdom
Go out in the world and work like money doesn’t matter, sing as if no one is listening, love as if you have never been hurt, and dance as if no one is watching.Collection: Hurt
Waterloo is a battle of the first rank won by a captain of the second.Collection: Firsts
The author creates a book and the people accept or not accept it. The creator of a book is an author and the creator of it’s fate are people.Collection: Book
The soul has greater need of the ideal than of the real.Collection: Real