Quotes from Victor Hugo

A harmony established contrary to sense is often more onerous than a war.

The most ferocious creatures are disarmed by caresses bestowed on their young.

Happy, even in the midst of anguish, is he to whom God has given a soul worthy of love and of unhappiness! He who has not viewed the things of this world and the heart of man under this double light has seen nothing and knows nothing of the true.

He had but one word for both these kinds of toil; he called them gardening. The mind is a garden, said he.

Jean Valjean felt his heart melt within him with delight, at all these sparks of a tenderness so exclusive, so wholly satisfied with himself alone. The poor man trembled, inundated with angelic joy; he declared to himself ecstatically that this would last all their lives; he told himself that he really had not suffered sufficiently to merit so radiant a bliss, and he thanked God, in the depths of his soul, for having permitted him to be loved thus, he, a wretch, by that innocent being.

Promise to give me a kiss on my brow when I am dead. --I shall feel it.

But logic ignores the more-or-less as absolutely as the sun ignores the candlelight.

Ah! indeed he must not be mounted. It does not suit his ideas to be a saddle-horse. Every one has his ambition. 'Draw? Yes. Carry? No.' We must suppose that is what he said to himself.

When Cosette went out with him, she leaned on his arm, proud, happy, her heart full to overflowing. Jean

The reduction of the universe to a single being, the expansion of a single being even to God, that is love.

To travel is to be born and to die at every instant;

Love each other well and always. There is nothing else but that in the world: love for each other.