Quotes from Victor Hugo

If one could only get out of a grief as one gets out of a city!

Happiness wishes everybody happy.

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?

The first proof of charity in a priest, especially a bishop, is poverty.

A library implies an act of faith which generations, still in darkness hid, sign in their night in witness of the dawn. À qui la faute? (1872)

Besides, to be fair to him, his viciousness was perhaps not innate. From his earliest steps among men he had felt, then seen himself the object of jeers, condemnation, rejection. Human speech for him always meant mockery and curses. As he grew older he had found nothing but hatred around him. He had caught it. He had acquired the general viciousness. He had picked up the weapon with which he had been wounded.

The soul in the darkness sins, but the real sinner is he who caused the darkness.

Liberation is not deliverance. One gets free from the galleys, but not from the sentence.

When you shall have learned to know, and to love, you will still suffer. The day is born in tears. The luminous weep, if only over those in darkness.

The girls chirped and chatted like uncaged warblers. They were delirious with joy... Intoxications of life's morning! Enchanted years! The wing of a dragonfly trembles! Oh, reader, whoever you may be, do you have such memories? Have you walked in the underbrush, pushing aside branches for the charming head behind you? Have you slid laughing, down some slope wet with rain, with the woman you loved?

Because things are not agreeable, said Jean Valjean, that is no reason for being unjust towards God.

What more could he need, this old man whose little leisure was divided between day-time gardening and night-time contemplation? Was not that narrow space with the sky its ceiling room enough for the worship of God in the most delicate of his works and in the most sublime? A garden to walk in and immensity to dream in -what more could he ask? A few flowers at his feet and above him the stars.