Victor Hugo Quotes

The reduction of the universe to a single being, the expansion of a single being even to God, this is love.

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.

These two halves of God, the Pope and the emperor.

Curiosity is one of the forms of feminine bravery.

Press on! A better fate awaits thee.

Je n'entre qu'à moitié dans la guerre civile. Je veux bien y mourir, je ne veux pas y tuer.

where would the shout of love begin, if not from the summit of sacrifice?

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.

My misfortune is that I still resemble a man too much. I should liked to be wholly a beast like that goat. - Quasimodo

Cosette, in her seclusion, like Marius in his, was all ready to take fire. Destiny, with its mysterious and fatal patience, was slowly bringing these two beings near each other, fully charged and all languishing with the stormy electricities of passion, — these two souls which held love as two clouds hold lightning, and which were to meet and mingle in a glace like clouds in a flash.

The power of a glance has been so much abused in love stories, that it has come to be disbelieved in. Few people dare now to say that two beings have fallen in love because they have looked at each other. Yet it is in this way that love begins, and in this way only. The rest is only the rest, and comes afterwards. Nothing is more real than these great shocks which two souls give each other in exchanging this spark.

At that particular moment when Cosette unconsciously looked with this glance which so affected Marius, Marius had no suspicion that he also had a glance which affected Cosette.

The beginning as well as the end of all his thoughts was hatred of human law, that hatred which, if it be not checked in its growth by some providential event, becomes, in a certain time, hatred of society, then hatred of the human race, and then hatred of creation, and reveals itself by a vague and incessant desire to injure some living being, it matters not who.

That is the explanation of war, an outrage by humanity upon humanity in despite of humanity.

The human soul has still greater need of the ideal than of the real. It is by the real that we exist, it is by the ideal that we live.

Good actions are the invisible hinges on the doors of heaven.

If you are stone, be magnetic; if a plant, be sensitive; but if you are human be love.