Quotes from Victor Hugo

The time for it has come, and it would indeed be strange if, in the present age, liberty, like light, should penetrate everywhere, except into that one place where freedom finds its most natural realm - in the world of ideas.

Breaking the gloomy bonds of the past is a mournful task.

This is at the beginning of my book: When a man is out of sight, it is not too long before he is out of mind. Victor Hugo

Work is the law; whoever spurns it as tiresome will have it as punishment

There are people who read very loud, and who have the appearance of giving themselves their word of honor as to what they are perusing.

This book is a drama whose first character is the Infinite. Man is the second.

It was Gwynplaine's laugh which created the laughter of others, yet he did not laugh himself. His face laughed; his thoughts did not. The extraordinary face which chance or a special and weird industry had fashioned for him, laughed alone. Gwynplaine had nothing to do with it.

Once, however, he had a pleasure. He had gone out with a Robert Estienne, which he had sold for thirty-five sous under the Quai Malaquais, and he returned with an Aldus which he had bought for forty sous in the Rue des Gres.—'I owe five sous,' he said, beaming on Mother Plutarque. That day he had no dinner.

Finally, he said to himself that it was a necessity, that his destiny was so fixed, that it was not for him to derange the arrangements of God, that at all events he must choose, either virtue without, and abomination within, or sanctity within, and infamy without.

The old woman who had given her lessons in what may be called the life of indigence, was a sainted spinster named Marguerite, who was pious with a true piety, poor and charitable towards the poor, and even towards the rich, knowing how to write just sufficiently to sign herself Marguerite, and believing in God, which is science.

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; t

Death is the entrance into the great light.