Victor Hugo: Trending quotes (page 16)

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“It is time, we repeat, that this monstrous slumber of men's consciences should end. It must not be, after that fearful scandal, the triumph of crime, that a scandal still more fearful should be presented to mankind: the indifference of the civilized world.”

Victor Hugo

Book I, III
Napoleon the Little (1852)

Time , Indifference , World , Fear

“This was the work that the nineteenth century had done among men, and was continuing in glorious, fashion to do,—that century of sterility, that century of domination, that century of decadence, that century of degradation, as it is called by the pedants, the rhetoricians, the imbeciles, and all that filthy brood of bigots, of knaves, and of sharpers, who sanctimoniously slaver gall upon glory, who assert that Pascal was a madman, Voltaire a coxcomb, and Rousseau a brute, and whose triumph it would be to put a fool's-cap upon the human race.”

Victor Hugo

Conclusion, Part Second, II
Napoleon the Little (1852)

Fashion , Fools , Men

“This age proclaims the sovereignty of the citizen, and the inviolability of life; it crowns the people, and consecrates man. In art, it possesses all varieties of genius,—writers, orators, poets, historians, publicists, philosophers, painters, sculptors, musicians; majesty, grace, power, force, splendour, colour, form, style; it renews its strength in the real and in the ideal, and bears in its hand the two thunderbolts, the true and the beautiful. In science it accomplishes unheard-of miracles; it makes of cotton salt petre, of steam a horse, of the voltaic battery a workman, of the electric fluid a messenger, of the sun a painter; it waters itself with subterranean streams, pending the time when it shall warm itself with the central fire; it opens upon the two infinites those two windows, the telescope upon the infinitely great, the microscope upon the infinitely little, and it finds stars in the first abyss, and insects in the second, which prove to it the existence of God... It annihilates time, it annihilates space, it annihilates suffering; it writes a letter from Paris to London, and has an answer in ten minutes; it cuts off a man's leg, the man sings and smiles.”

Victor Hugo

Conclusion, Part Second, II
Napoleon the Little (1852)

Singing , God , Time , Sun

“Let us proclaim it aloud, let us proclaim it in our fall and in our defeat, this is the greatest of all ages! and do you know the reason why? because it is the mildest.”

Victor Hugo

Conclusion, Part Second, II
Napoleon the Little (1852)

Age

“Let us not fall into the vulgar error, which is to curse and to dishonour the age in which we live. However deep the shame of the present, whatever blows we receive from the fluctuation of events, whatever the apparent desertion or the momentary lethargy of mental vigour, none of us... will repudiate the magnificent epoch in which we live, the virile age of mankind.”

Victor Hugo

Conclusion, Part Second, II
Napoleon the Little (1852)

Error , Age

“I will be Chateaubriand or nothing.”

Victor Hugo

Written at the age of 15 in one of his notebooks (c. 1817), as quoted in The Literary Movement in France During the Nineteenth Century (1897) by Georges Pellissier

“To divinise is human, to humanise is divine.”

Victor Hugo

Les feuilles d'automne (1831)