Mariam Khalvashi > Mariam's Quotes

“Knowledge is a weight added to conscience.”
― Victor Hugo, The Man Who Laughs

“To speak out aloud when alone is as it were to have a dialogue with the divinity which is within.”
― Victor Hugo, The Man Who Laughs

“I am come to warn you. I am come to impeach your happiness. It is fashioned out of the misery of your neighbour. You have everything, and that is composed of the nothing of others… As for me, I am but a voice. Mankind is a mouth, of which I am the cry. You shall hear me!”
― Victor Hugo, The Man Who Laughs

“Master Nicless was a good-hearted man enough, but a dreadful coward. Once terrified, he became a brute. The greatest cruelty is that inspired by fear.”
― Victor Hugo, The Man Who Laughs

“Where should we be if every one had his rights? Fancy every one's having a hand in the government? Can you imagine a city ruled by its citizens? Why, the citizens are the team, and the team cannot be driver. To put to the vote is to throw to the winds. Would you have states driven like clouds? Disorder cannot build up order. With chaos for an architect, the edifice would be a Babel. And, besides, what tyranny is this pretended liberty! As for me, I wish to enjoy myself; not to govern. It is a bore to have to vote; I want to dance. A prince is a providence, and takes care of us all. Truly the king is generous to take so much trouble for our sakes. Besides, he is to the manner born. He knows what it is. It's his business. Peace, War, Legislation, Finance--what have the people to do with such things? Of course the people have to pay; of course the people have to serve; but that should suffice them. They have a place in policy; from them come two essential things, the army and the budget. To be liable to contribute, and to be liable to serve; is not that enough? What more should they want? They are the military and the financial arm. A magnificent rôle. The king reigns for them, and they must reward him accordingly. Taxation and the civil list are the salaries paid by the peoples and earned by the prince. The people give their blood and their money, in return for which they are led. To wish to lead themselves! what an absurd idea! They require a guide; being ignorant, they are blind. Has not the blind man his dog? Only the people have a lion, the king, who consents to act the dog. How kind of him! But why are the people ignorant? because it is good for them. Ignorance is the guardian of Virtue. Where there is no perspective there is no ambition. The ignorant man is in useful darkness, which, suppressing sight, suppresses covetousness: whence innocence. He who reads, thinks; who thinks, reasons. But not to reason is duty; and happiness as well. These truths are incontestable; society is based on them.”
― Victor Hugo, The Man Who Laughs

“There is consent in a smile, while a laugh is often a refusal.”
― Victor Hugo, The Man Who Laughs

“To speak out aloud when alone is as it were to have a dialogue with the divinity which is within. It was, as is well known, a custom of Socrates; he declaimed to himself. Luther did the same.”
― Victor Hugo, The Man Who Laughs

“He allowed himself to be swayed by his conviction that human beings are not born once and for all on the day their mothers give birth to them, but that life obliges them over and over again to give birth to themselves.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, Love in the Time of Cholera

“The only regret I will have in dying is if it is not for love.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, Love in the Time of Cholera

“I have no idea what's awaiting me, or what will happen when this all ends. For the moment I know this: there are sick people and they need curing.”
― Albert Camus, The Plague

“But, you know, I feel more fellowship with the defeated than with saints. Heroism and sanctity don't really appeal to me, I imagine. What interests me is being a man.”
― Albert Camus, The Plague

“But what does it mean, the plague? It's life, that's all.”
― Albert Camus, The Plague

“They knew now that if there is one thing one can always yearn for, and sometimes attain, it is human love.”
― Albert Camus, The Plague

“Well, personally, I've seen enough of people who die for an idea. I don't believe in heroism; I know it's easy and I've learned that it can be murderous. What interests me is living and dying for what one loves.”
― Albert Camus, The Plague

“how hard it must be to live only with what one knows and what one remembers, cut off from what one hopes for!”
― Albert Camus, The Plague

“A loveless world is a dead world.”
― Albert Camus, The Plague

“And indeed it could be said that once the faintest stirring of hope became possible, the dominion of plague was ended.”
― Albert Camus, The Plague

“But what are a hundred million deaths? When one has served in a war, one hardly knows what a dead man is, after a while. And since a dead man has no substance unless one has actually seen him dead, a hundred million corpses broadcast through history are no more than a puff of smoke in the imagination.”
― Albert Camus, The Plague

“Each of us has the plague within him; no one, no one on earth is free from it. And i know, too, that we must keep endless watch on ourselves lest in a careless moment we breath in someone's face and fasten the infection on him. What's natural is the microbe. All the rest – health, integrity, purity (if you like) – is a product of the human will, of a vigilance that must never falter.”
― Albert Camus, The Plague

“For there is no denying that the plague had gradually killed off in all of us the faculty not of love only but even of friendship. Naturally enough, since love asks something of the future, and nothing was left us but a series of present moments.”
― Albert Camus, The Plague

“Tarrou had "lost the match," as he put it. But what had he, Rieux, won? No more than the experience of having known plague and remembering it, of having known friendship and remembering it, of knowing affection and being destined one day to remember it. So all a man could win in the conflict between plague and life was knowledge and memories. But Tarrou, perhaps, would have called that winning the match.”
― Albert Camus, The Plague

“He knew what those jubilant crowds did not know but could have learned from books: that the plague bacillus never dies or disappears for good; that it can lie dormant for years and years in furniture and linen chests; that it bides its time in bedrooms, cellars, trunks, and bookshelves; and that perhaps the day would come when, for the bane and the enlightening of men, it would rouse up its rats again and send them forth to die in a happy city.”
― Albert Camus, The Plague

“You think about bathing in the sea – thick as velvet, supple and smooth as a wild animal. You think about swimming naked, and at night, with the stars, and a friend. Swim till you’re far from the world, and breathing together in the same rhythm, and free of absolutely everything.”
― Albert Camus, The Plague

“After all," the doctor repeated, then hesitated again, fixing his eyes on Tarrou, "it's something that a man of your sort can understand most likely, but since the order of the world is shaped by death, mightn't it be better for God if we refuse to believe in Him and struggle with all our might against death, without raising our eyes toward the horizon where He sits in silence?"
Tarrou nodded.
"Yes. But your victories will never be lasting; that's all."
Rieux's face darkened.
"Yes, I know that. But it's no reason for giving up the struggle."
"No reason, I agree. Only, I now can picture what this plague must mean for you."
"Yes. A never ending defeat.”
― Albert Camus, The Plague

“They looked like two children," she told me. And that thought frightened her, because she'd always felt that only children are capable of everything.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, Chronicle of a Death Foretold

“There had never been a death so foretold.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, Crónica de una muerte anunciada

“La fatalidad nos hace invisibles”
― Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Cronaca di una morte annunciata

“Most of those who could have done something to prevent the crime and did not consoled themselves with the pretext that affairs of honor are sacred monopolies, giving access only to those who are part of the drama.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, Chronicle of a Death Foretold

“The widower Xius died two months later. "He died because of that," Dr. Dionisio Iguarلn said. "He was healthier than the rest of us, but when you listened with the stethoscope you could hear the tears bubbling inside his heart.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, Chronicle of a Death Foretold

“only children are capable of everything.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, Chronicle of a Death Foretold