Victor Hugo
Nothing makes a man so adventurous as an empty pocket.Collection: Wisdom
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.Collection: Night
Love would never be a promise of a rose garden unless it is showered with light of faith, water of sincerity and air of passion. Sometimes we make love with our eyes. Sometimes we make love with our hands. Sometimes we make love with our bodies. Always we make love with our hearts. If I could reach up and hold a star for every time you've made me smile, the entire evening sky would be in the palm of my hand. To love another person is to see the face of God.Collection: Stars
If I speak, I am condemned. If I stay silent, I am damned!Collection: Political
The future has many names: For the weak, it means the unattainable. For the fearful, it means the unknown. For the courageous, it means opportunity.Collection: Mean
Knowledge is a weight added to conscience.Collection: Wisdom
Those who do not weep, do not see.Collection: Sad
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.Collection: Cat
Diamonds are to be found only in the darkness of the earth, and truth in the darkness of the mind.Collection: Darkness
To love or have loved, that is enough. Ask nothing further. There is no other pearl to be found in the dark folds of life.Collection: Love
Crime is redeemed by remorse, but not by a blow of the axe or slipknot. Blood has to be washed by tears but not by blood.Collection: Blow
Every blade has two edges; he who wounds with one wounds himself with the other.Collection: Two
Revolutions spring not from accident, but from necessity. A revolution is a return from the factitious to the real. It takes place because it must.Collection: Spring
How frightened hypocrisy hastens to defend itself.Collection: Hypocrisy
If suffer we must, let's suffer on the heights.Collection: Suffering
And then, strange to say, the first symptom of true love in a young man is timidity; in a girl, it is boldness.Collection: Love
Superstitions, bigotries, hypocrisies, prejudices, these phantoms, phantoms though they be, cling to life; they have teeth and nails in their shadowy substance, and we must grapple with them individually and make war on them without truce; for it is one of humanity's inevitabilities to be condemned to eternal struggle with phantoms.Collection: War
Social prosperity means man happy, the citizen free, the nation great.Collection: Mean
The owl goes not into the nest of the lark.Collection: Owl
Cheerfulness is like money well expended in charity; the more we dispense of it, the greater our possession.Collection: Charity
God will reward you,' he said. 'You must be an angel since you care for flowers.Collection: Flower
Anger may be foolish and absurd, and one may be wrongly irritated, but a man never feels outraged unless in some respect he is fundamentally right.Collection: Men
God blesses man, not for having found but for having sought.Collection: Men
I refuse the oration of all churches. I ask a prayer of all souls. I believe in God.Collection: God
History has its truth, and so has legend. Legendary truth is of another nature than historical truth. Legendary truth is invention whose result is reality. Furthermore, history and legend have the same goal; to depict eternal man beneath momentary man.Collection: Reality
What love commences can be finished by God alone.Collection: Finished
It is the essence of truth that it is never excessive. Why should it exaggerate? There is that which should be destroyed and that which should be simply illuminated and studied. How great is the force of benevolent and searching examination! We must not resort to the flame where only light is required.Collection: Light
Slaves would be tyrants were the chance theirs.Collection: Work
Human society, the world, and the whole of mankind is to be found in the alphabet.Collection: World
To commit the least possible sin is the law for man. To live without sin is the dream of an angel. Everything terrestrial is subject to sin. Sin is a gravitation.Collection: Dream
People generally will soon understand that writers should be judged, not according to rules and species, which are contrary to nature and art, but according to the immutable principles of the art of composition, and the special laws of their individual temperaments.Collection: Art
You would have imagined her at one moment a maniac, at another a queen.Collection: Queens
Thus, during those nineteen years of torture and slavery, did this soul rise and fall at the same time. Light entered on the one side, and darkness on the other.Collection: Fall
Symmetry is tedious, and tedium is the very basis of mourning. Despair yawns.Collection: Boredom
Great blunders are often made, like large ropes, of a multitude of fibers. Take the cable thread by thread, take separately all the little determining motives, you break them one after another, and you say: that is all! Wind them and twist them together, they become an enormity.Collection: Wind
To rove about, musing, that is to say loitering, is, for a philosopher, a good way of spending time.Collection: Way
And so, being in Heaven, it was easy for him to lose sight of earth.Collection: Sight
Inanimate objects sometimes appear endowed with a strange power of sight. A statue notices, a tower watches, the face of an edifice contemplates.Collection: Sight
Should we continue to look upwards? Is the light we can see in the sky one of those which will presently be extinguished? The ideal is terrifying to behold... brilliant but threatened on all sides by the dark forces that surround it: nevertheless, no more in danger than a star in the jaws of the clouds.Collection: Stars
France is great because she is France.Collection: France
The transept belfry and the two towers were to him three great cages, the birds in which, taught by him, would sing for him alone. Yet it was these same bells which had made him deaf; but mothers are often fondest of the child who has made them suffer most.Collection: Mother
Ah! There you are! he exclaimed, looking at Jean Valjean. I'm so glad to see you. Well, but how is this? I gave you the candlesticks too, which are of silver like the rest, and for which you can certainly get two hundred francs. Why did you not carry them away with your forks and spoons?Collection: Two
What dangers you run, O noble souls! Often, you give your heart, but we take only your body. Your heart is left to you and you look at it in the shadows and shudder.Collection: Running
Diamonds are found only in the dark bowels of the earth; truths are found only in the depths of thought. It seemed to him that after descending into those depths after long groping in the blackest of this darkness, he had at last found one of these diamonds, one of these truths, and that he held it in his hand; and it blinded him to look at it. (pg. 231)Collection: Dark
Never had the sky been more studded with stars and more charming, the trees more trembling, the odor of the grass more penetrating; never had the birds fallen asleep among the leaves with a sweeter noise; never had all the harmonies of universal serenity responded more thoroughly to the inward music of love; never had Marius been more captivated, more happy, more ecstatic.Collection: Stars
Slowly he took out the clothes in which, ten years beforem Cosette had left Montfermeil; first the little dress, then the black scarf, then the great heavy child's shoes Cosette could still almost have worn, so small was her foot, then the vest of very thich fustian, then the knitted petticoat, the the apron with pockets, then the wool stockings.... Then his venerable white head fell on the bed, this old stoical heart broke, his face was swallowed up, so to speak, in Cosette's clothes, and anybody who had passed along the staircase at that moment would have heard irrepressible sobbing.Collection: Children
Out Milky Way is the dwelling; the nebulae are the city.Collection: Cities
For true poetry, complete poetry, consists in the harmony of contraries. Hence, it is time to say aloud--and it is here above allthat exceptions prove the rule--that everything that exists in nature exists in art.Collection: Art
To divinise is human, to humanise is divine.Collection: Divine