"Ah," cried Gavroche, "what does this mean? It rains again! ...If this continues, I withdraw my subscription."
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Quote collection
Victor Hugo quotes (page 37 of 49)
966 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"The convent is supreme egotism resulting in supreme self-denial."
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"Is it not when the fall is the lowest that charity ought to be the greatest?"
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"Paris is a sum total. Paris is the ceiling of the human race. All this prodigious city is an epitome of dead and living manners and customs. He who sees Paris, seems to see all history through with the sky and constellations in the intervals."
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"Algebra applies to the clouds."
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"Slaves would be tyrants were the chance theirs."
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"The saints were his friends, and blessed him; the monsters were his friends, and guarded him."
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"He had, they said, tasted in succession all the apples of the tree of knowledge, and, whether from hunger or disgust, had ended by tasting the forbidden fruit."
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"Gavroche had fallen only to rise again; he sat up, a long stream of blood rolled down his face, he raised both arms in air, looked in the direction whence the shot came, and began to sing."
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"Often when we think we are knotting one thread, we are tying quite another."
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"We should judge a man much more surely from what he dreams than from what he thinks."
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"There are plenty who regard a wall behind which something is happening as a very curious thing."
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"As for the bishop, the sight of the guillotine was a great shock to him, from which he recovered only slowly."
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"When people look back at their childhood or youth, their wistfulness comes from the memory, not of what their lives had been in those years, but of what life had then promised to be. The expectation of some indefinable splendor, of the unusual, the exciting, the great is an attribute of youth and the process of aging is the process of that expectations' gradual extinction. One does not have to let it happen. But that fire dies for lack of fuel, under the gray weight of disappointments."
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"The transept belfry and the two towers were to him three great cages, the birds in which, taught by him, would sing for him alone. Yet it was these same bells which had made him deaf; but mothers are often fondest of the child who has made them suffer most."
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"Never had the sky been more studded with stars and more charming, the trees more trembling, the odor of the grass more penetrating; never had the birds fallen asleep among the leaves with a sweeter noise; never had all the harmonies of universal serenity responded more thoroughly to the inward music of love; never had Marius been more captivated, more happy, more ecstatic."
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"France is great because she is France."
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"Let us admit, without bitterness, that the individual has his distinct interests and can, without felony, stipulate for those interests and defend them. The present has its pardonable amount of egotism; momentary life has its claims, and cannot be expected to sacrifice itself incessantly to the future. The generation which is in its turn passing over the earth is not forced to abridge its life for the sake of the generations, its equals after all, whose turn shall come later on."
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"Should we continue to look upwards? Is the light we can see in the sky one of those which will presently be extinguished? The ideal is terrifying to behold... brilliant but threatened on all sides by the dark forces that surround it: nevertheless, no more in danger than a star in the jaws of the clouds."
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"Each of our passions, even love, has a stomach that must not be overloaded. We must in everything write the word 'finis' in time; we must restrain ourselves, when it becomes urgent; we must draw the bolt on the appetite, play a fantasia on the violin, then break the strings with our own hand. The Wise man is he who knows when and how to stop."
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