Complete Works of Victor Hugo Quotes

“what is there left to desire beyond it? A little garden in which to walk, and immensity in which to dream. At one's feet that which can be cultivated and plucked; over head that which one can study and meditate upon: some flowers on earth, and all the stars in the sky.”
― Victor Hugo, Complete Works of Victor Hugo

“Well,” said he, “what are you thinking of?” “I am thinking,” said I, “that I shall be past thinking, this evening.” “Oh, that’s it,” returned he. “Come, come, you are too sad. Mr. Castaing conversed on the day of his execution.” Then, after a pause, he continued: “I accompanied Mr. Papavoine on his last day. He wore his otter-skin cap, and smoked his cigar. As for the young men of La Rochelle, they only spoke among themselves, but still they spoke. As for you, I really think you are too pensive, young man.” “Young man?” I repeated. “I am older than you; every quarter of an hour which passes makes me a year older.” He turned round, looked at me some minutes with stupid astonishment, and then began to titter. “Come, you are joking; older than I am? why, I might be your grandfather.”
― Victor Hugo, Complete Works of Victor Hugo

“Style is the form of the ideal; rhythm is its movement.”
― Victor Hugo, Complete Works of Victor Hugo

“It is not that Combeferre was not capable of fighting, he did not refuse a hand-to-hand combat with the obstacle, and to attack it by main force and explosively; but it suited him better to bring the human race into accord with its destiny gradually, by means of education, the inculcation of axioms, the promulgation of positive laws; and, between two lights, his preference was rather for illumination than for conflagration. A conflagration can create an aurora, no doubt, but why not await the dawn? A volcano illuminates, but daybreak furnishes a still better illumination. Possibly, Combeferre preferred the whiteness of the beautiful to the blaze of the sublime. A light troubled by smoke, progress purchased at the expense of violence, only half satisfied this tender and serious spirit. The headlong precipitation of a people into the truth, a '93, terrified him; nevertheless, stagnation was still more repulsive to him, in it he detected putrefaction and death; on the whole, he preferred scum to miasma, and he preferred the torrent to the cesspool, and the falls of Niagara to the lake of Montfaucon. In short, he desired neither halt nor haste.”
― Victor Hugo, Complete Works of Victor Hugo

“There are birds in the clouds, just as there are angels above human distresses; but what can they do for him? They sing and fly and float, and he, he rattles in the death agony.”
― Victor Hugo, Complete Works of Victor Hugo

“Sir, sir, I am sorry for Marie Antoinette, archduchess and queen; but I am also sorry for that poor Huguenot woman, who, in 1685, under Louis the Great, sir, while with a nursing infant, was bound, naked to the waist, to a stake, and the child kept at a distance; her breast swelled with milk and her heart with anguish; the little one, hungry and pale, beheld that breast and cried and agonized; the executioner said to the woman, a mother and a nurse, 'Abjure!' giving her her choice between the death of her infant and the death of her conscience. What say you to that torture of Tantalus as applied to a mother? Bear this well in mind sir: the French Revolution had its reasons for existence; its wrath will be absolved by the future; its result is the world made better. From its most terrible blows there comes forth a caress for the human race. I abridge, I stop, I have too much the advantage;”
― Victor Hugo, Complete Works of Victor Hugo

“our tears must begin before Louis XVII. I will weep with you over the children of kings, provided that you will weep with me over the children of the people." "I weep for all," said the Bishop. "Equally!" exclaimed conventionary G——; "and if the balance must incline, let it be on the side of the people. They have been suffering longer.”
― Victor Hugo, Complete Works of Victor Hugo

“Biassou raised his hand, and as if by enchantment the tumult was stilled, and each negro returned to his place in the ranks in silence. The discipline which Biassou had imposed upon his equals by the exercise of his power of will struck me, I may say, with admiration. All the soldiers of the force seemed to exist only to obey the wishes of their chief, as the notes of the harpsichord under the fingers of the musician.”
― Victor Hugo, Complete Works of Victor Hugo

“The learned and judicious King James I. had women of this kind boiled, and then tasting the water of the cauldron, was able to say from its flavour, "That was a sorceress;" or "That was not one." It is to be regretted that the kings of these latter days no longer possess a talent which placed in so strong a light the utility of monarchical institutions.”
― Victor Hugo, Complete Works of Victor Hugo

“Certain strange habits: arriving at the hour when other people are taking their leave, keeping in the background when other people are displaying themselves, preserving on all occasions what may be designated as the wall-colored mantle, seeking the solitary walk, preferring the deserted street, avoiding any share in conversation, avoiding crowds and festivals, seeming at one's ease and living poorly, having one's key in one's pocket, and one's candle at the porter's lodge, however rich one may be, entering by the side door, ascending the private staircase,—all these insignificant singularities, fugitive folds on the surface, often proceed from a formidable foundation.”
― Victor Hugo, Complete Works of Victor Hugo

“Has it not happened to all of us, in certain supreme conjunctures, to stop our ears in order that we may not hear the reply, after we have asked a question? It is especially when one loves that one gives way to these exhibitions of cowardice.”
― Victor Hugo, Complete Works of Victor Hugo

“Are there then chains for two which are forged on high? and does God take pleasure in coupling the angel with the demon?”
― Victor Hugo, Complete Works of Victor Hugo

“At the end of another minute, the carriage-load of maskers had their hands full, the multitude set to yelling, which is the crowd's caress to masquerades; and the two maskers who had just spoken had to face the throng with their comrades, and did not find the entire repertory of projectiles of the fishmarkets too extensive to retort to the enormous verbal attacks of the populace. A frightful exchange of metaphors took place between the maskers and the crowd.”
― Victor Hugo, Complete Works of Victor Hugo

“Two men who have a secret in common, and who, by a sort of tacit agreement, exchange not a word on the subject, are less rare than is commonly supposed.”
― Victor Hugo, Complete Works of Victor Hugo

“Get it well fixed in your noddles, my children, that you are in the true road. Love each other. Be foolish about it. Love is the folly of men and the wit of God.”
― Victor Hugo, Complete Works of Victor Hugo

“Angel is the only word in the language which cannot be worn out. No other word could resist the merciless use which lovers make of it.”
― Victor Hugo, Complete Works of Victor Hugo

“Revolts, in the present state of society, are so much the fault of every one, that they are followed by a certain necessity of shutting the eyes.”
― Victor Hugo, Complete Works of Victor Hugo

“Boulatruelle committed the error of not comprehending this. He believed in the straight line; a respectable optical illusion which ruins many a man. The thicket, bristling as it was, struck him as the best road. "Let's take to the wolves' Rue de Rivoli," said he. Boulatruelle, accustomed to taking crooked courses, was on this occasion guilty of the fault of going straight. He flung himself resolutely into the tangle of undergrowth.”
― Victor Hugo, Complete Works of Victor Hugo

“Boulatruelle committed the error of not comprehending this. He believed in the straight line; a respectable optical illusion which ruins many a man.”
― Victor Hugo, Complete Works of Victor Hugo

“All was black. Nothing was to be distinguished. A sound of foam was audible; but the river could not be seen. At moments, in that dizzy depth, a gleam of light appeared, and undulated vaguely, water possessing the power of taking light, no one knows whence, and converting it into a snake.”
― Victor Hugo, Complete Works of Victor Hugo

“such moments of oblivion do come to men; suffering refrains from harassing the unhappy wretch; everything is eclipsed in the thoughts; peace broods over the dreamer like night; and, beneath the twilight which beams and in imitation of the sky which is illuminated, the soul becomes studded with stars.”
― Victor Hugo, Complete Works of Victor Hugo

“Everywhere around him reigned silence, but that charming silence when the sun has set in an unclouded azure sky. Twilight had descended; night was drawing on, the great deliverer, the friend of all those who need a mantle of darkness that they may escape from an anguish.”
― Victor Hugo, Complete Works of Victor Hugo

“The waste-trap of safety had suddenly yawned beneath him. Celestial goodness had, in a manner, captured him by treachery. Adorable ambuscades of providence!”
― Victor Hugo, Complete Works of Victor Hugo

“Tergiversation”
― Victor Hugo, Complete Works of Victor Hugo

“Great public assassinations, political and religious butcheries, traverse this underground passage of civilization, and thrust their corpses there. For the eye of the thinker, all historic murderers are to be found there, in that hideous penumbra, on their knees, with a scrap of their winding-sheet for an apron, dismally sponging out their work.”
― Victor Hugo, Complete Works of Victor Hugo

“He repeated: "Long live the Republic!" crossed the room with a firm stride and placed himself in front of the guns beside Enjolras. "Finish both of us at one blow," said he. And turning gently to Enjolras, he said to him: "Do you permit it?" Enjolras pressed his hand with a smile. This smile was not ended when the report resounded. Enjolras, pierced by eight bullets, remained leaning against the wall, as though the balls had nailed him there. Only, his head was bowed. Grantaire fell at his feet, as though struck by a thunderbolt.”
― Victor Hugo, Complete Works of Victor Hugo

“The book which the reader has under his eye at this moment is, from one end to the other, as a whole and in detail, whatever may be its intermittences, exceptions and faults, the march from evil to good, from the unjust to the just, from night to day, from appetite to conscience, from rottenness to life, from hell to heaven, from nothingness to God.”
― Victor Hugo, Complete Works of Victor Hugo

“People shout to them: "You are tearing up the pavements of hell!" They might reply: "That is because our barricade is made of good intentions.”
― Victor Hugo, Complete Works of Victor Hugo

“Whom shall he reproach? No one and every one. The incomplete times in which we live.”
― Victor Hugo, Complete Works of Victor Hugo

“Every one has noticed with what nimbleness a coin which one has dropped on the ground rolls away and hides, and with what art it renders itself undiscoverable. There are thoughts which play us the same trick; they nestle away in a corner of our brain; that is the end of them; they are lost; it is impossible to lay the memory on them.”
― Victor Hugo, Complete Works of Victor Hugo