Quotes from Victor Hugo

Is it not when the fall is the lowest that charity ought to be the greatest?

To love is to act.

Ye who suffer because ye love, love yet more. To die of love, is to live in it.

Great edifices, like great mountains, are the work of the ages.

The wicked envy and hate; it is their way of admiring.

Not ill? No truly, I am young, healthful, and strong; the blood flows freely in my veins; my limbs obey my will; I am robust in mind and body, constituted for a long life. Yes, all this is true; and yet, nevertheless, I have an illness, a fatal illness,--an illness given by the hand of man!

Paris, viewed from the towers of Notre Dame in the cool dawn of a summer morning, is a delectable and a magnificent sight; and the Paris of that period must have been eminently so.

Not seeing people allows you to think of them as perfect in all kinds of ways.

To speak out aloud when alone is as it were to have a dialogue with the divinity which is within.

I repeat, whether we be Italians or Frenchmen, misery concerns us all.

Javert, though hideous, was not ignoble.

That evening, before he went to bed, he said again: Let us never fear robbers nor murderers. Those are dangers from without, petty dangers. Let us fear ourselves. Prejudices are the real robbers; vices are the real murderers. The great dangers lie within ourselves. What matters it what threatens our head or our purse! Let us think only of that which threatens our soul.