Quotes from Victor Hugo

An enormous fortress of prejudices, privileges, superstitions, lies, exactions, abuses, violences, iniquities, and darkness still stands erect in this world, with its towers of hatred. It must be cast down. This monstrous mass must be made to crumble. To conquer at Austerlitz is grand; to take the Bastille is immense.

Man has upon him his flesh, which is at once his burden and his temptation. He drags it with him and yields to it. He must watch it, cheek it, repress it, and obey it only at the last extremity. There may be some fault even in this obedience; but the fault thus committed is venial; it is a fall, but a fall on the knees which may terminate in prayer.

Man is not a circle with a single centre; he is an ellipse with a double focus. Facts form one of these, and ideas the other.

The supreme happiness of life consists in the conviction that one is loved; loved for one's own sake—let us say rather, loved in spite of one's self;

True, I tore the drapery from the altar; but it was to dress the wounds of the country.

The beautiful is just as useful as the useful.

He visited the poor so long as he had any money; when he no longer had any, he visited the rich.

to all those unfortunate men who are widowers, I throw the sublime proclamation of Bonaparte to the army of Italy: Soldiers, you are in need of everything; the enemy has it.

and after all in this house what have we to fear? There is always someone with us who is stronger. The devil may visit us, but God lives here.

Yes, the brutalities of progress are called revolutions. When they are over, this is recognized: that the human race has been harshly treated, but that it has advanced.

Shall we continue to raise our eyes to heaven? is the luminous point which we distinguish there one of those which vanish? The ideal is frightful to behold, thus lost in the depths, small, isolated, imperceptible, brilliant, but surrounded by those great, black menaces, monstrously heaped around it; yet no more in danger than a star in the maw of the clouds.

Teach the ignorant as much as you possibly can: society is culpable for not giving instruction gratis, and is responsible for the night it produces. This soul s full of darkness, and sin is committed, but the guilt person is not the man who commits the sin, but he who produces the darkness.