Quotes from Victor Hugo

He had the confidence of a man who had never been wounded.

Progress is not accomplished in one stage.

To love and be loved, that is the miracle of youth

They shall exist, and so long as society shall be what it is, they will be what they are. Under the dark vault of their cave, they are forever reproduced in the ooze. What is required to exorcise these goblins? Light. Light in floods. No bat resists the dawn. Illuminate society.

With a remainder of that brotherly compassion which is never totally absent from the heart of a drinker, Phoebus rolled Jehan with his foot onto one of those poor man's pillows which Providence provides on all the street corners of Paris and which the rich disdainfully refer to as heaps of garbage.

Jean Valjean, my brother, you no longer belong to evil, but to good. It is your soul that I buy from you; I withdraw it from black thoughts and the spirit of perdition, and I give it to God.

But, reverend master, it is not sufficient to pass one's life, one must earn the means for life.

Carve as we will the mysterious block of which our life is made, the black vein of destiny constantly reappears in it.

I have a dream my life would be. So different from this hell I'm living. So different now from what it seem. Now life has killed the dream I dreamed. *Fantine

What a transfiguration it is to love! And the little shrieks, the pursuits in the grass, the waists encircled by stealth, the jargon that is melody, the adoration that breaks through in the way a syllable is said, those cherries snatched form one pair of lips by another - It all catches fire and turns into celestial glories.

His mind could do without faith, but his heart could not do without friendship.

He believed that faith gives health. He sought to counsel and calm the despairing by pointing out the Man of Resignation, and to transform the grief that contemplates the grave by showing it the grief that looks up to the stars.