Victor Hugo: Trending quotes (page 11)

“If he had had all Peru in his pocket, he would certainly have given it to this dancer; but Gringoire had not Peru in his pocket; and besides, America was not yet discovered. (p. 66)”

“At the moment when her eyes closed, when all feeling vanished in her, she thought that she felt a touch of fire imprinted on her lips, a kiss more burning than the red-hot iron of the executioner.”

“There are people who observe the rules of honor as one observes the stars, from a great distance.”

“Man is not a circle with a single center; he is an ellipse with two focii. Facts are one, ideas are the other.”

“France is great because she is France.”

“Sometimes he used a spade in his garden, and sometimes he read and wrote. He had but one name for these two kinds of labor; he called them gardening. ‘The Spirit is a garden,’ said he”

“Die, very good, but do not make others die. Suicides like the one which is about to take place here are sublime, but suicide is restricted, and does not allow of extension; and so soon as it affects your neighbors, suicide becomes murder.”

“Freedom in art, freedom in society, this is the double goal towards which all consistent and logical minds must strive.”

“where the telescope ends the microscope begins, and who can say which has the wider vision?”

“Table talk and Lovers' talk equally elude the grasp; Lovers' Talk is clouds, Table Talk is smoke."

Les Miserables”

“Large, heavy, ragged black clouds hung like crape hammocks beneath the starry cope of the night. You would have said that they were the cobwebs of the firmament.”

“where would the shout of love begin, if not from the summit of sacrifice?”

“The greatest products of architecture are less the works of individuals than of society; rather the offspring of a nation's effort, than the inspired flash of a man of genius…”

“True or false, that which is said of men often occupies as important a place in their lives, and above all in their destinies, as that which they do.”

“A breath of Paris preserves the soul.”

“But alas, if I have not maintained my victory, it is God's fault for not making man and the devil of equal strength.”

“Sire, you are looking at a plain man, and I am looking at a great man. Each of us may benefit.”

“She worked in order to live, and presently fell in love, also in order to live, for the heart, too, has its hunger.”

“When a man is out of sight, it is not too long before he is out of mind.”