Victor Hugo: Man (page 2)

Victor Hugo was French poet, novelist, and dramatist. Explore interesting quotes on man.
Victor Hugo: 616   quotes 51   likes

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

Victor Hugo book Les Misérables

Source: Les Misérables

“It is man's consolation that the future is to be a sunrise instead of a sunset.”

Victor Hugo book Les Misérables

Que l'avenir soit un orient au lieu d'être un couchant, c'est la consolation de l'homme.
Part I, Book II, Chapter II, Section V
William Shakespeare (1864)
Source: Les Misérables

Future

“God manifests himself to us in the first degree through the life of the universe, and in the second degree through the thought of man. The second manifestation is not less holy than the first. The first is named Nature, the second is named Art.”

Victor Hugo book William Shakespeare

Dieu se manifeste à nous au premier degré à travers la vie de l’univers, et au deuxième degré à travers la pensée de l’homme. La deuxième manifestation n’est pas moins sacrée que la première. La première s’appelle la Nature, la deuxième s’appelle l’Art.

Part I, Book II, Chapter I
William Shakespeare (1864)

Life , God , Art , Nature

“To rise at six, to sleep at ten,
To sup at ten, to dine at six,
Make a man live for ten times ten.”

Victor Hugo

Lever à six, coucher à dix,
Dîner à dix, souper à six,
Font vivre l'homme dix fois dix.
Inscription in Hugo's dining room, quoted in Gustave Larroumet, La maison de Victor Hugo: Impressions de Guernesey (1895), Chapter III

Sleep , Time

“Homer is one of the men of genius who solve that fine problem of art — the finest of all, perhaps — truly to depict humanity by the enlargement of man: that is, to generate the real in the ideal.”

Victor Hugo book William Shakespeare

Homère est un des génies qui résolvent ce beau problème de l’art, le plus beau de tous peut-être, la peinture vraie de l’humanité obtenue par le grandissement de l’homme, c’est-à-dire la génération du réel dans l’idéal.
Part I, Book II, Chapter II, Section I
William Shakespeare (1864)

Men , Art , Problem

“In short, I am doing what I can, I suffer with the same universal suffering, and I try to assuage it, I possess only the puny forces of a man, and I cry to all: "Help me!"”

Victor Hugo

En somme, je fais ce que je peux, je souffre de la souffrance universelle, et je tâche de la soulager, je n'ai que les chétives forces d'un homme, et je crie à tous: aidez-moi.
Letter To M. Daelli on Les Misérables (1862)

Suffering , Universe , Help , Cry

“At the hour of civilization through which we are now passing, and which is still so sombre, the miserable's name is Man; he is agonizing in all climes, and he is groaning in all languages.”

Victor Hugo

À l'heure, si sombre encore, de la civilisation où nous sommes, le misérable s'appelle L'HOMME; il agonise sous tous les climats, et il gémit dans toutes les langues.
Letter To M. Daelli on Les Misérables (1862)

“Whether we be Italians or Frenchmen, misery concerns us all. Ever since history has been written, ever since philosophy has meditated, misery has been the garment of the human race; the moment has at length arrived for tearing off that rag, and for replacing, upon the naked limbs of the Man-People, the sinister fragment of the past with the grand purple robe of the dawn.”

Victor Hugo

Italiens ou français, la misère nous regarde tous. Depuis que l'histoire écrit et que la philosophie médite, la misère est le vêtement du genre humain; le moment serait enfin venu d'arracher cette guenille, et de remplacer, sur les membres nus de l'Homme-Peuple, la loque sinistre du passé par la grande robe pourpre de l'aurore.
Letter To M. Daelli on Les Misérables (1862)

People , History , Tear , Past

“Was it possible that Napoleon should win the battle of Waterloo? We answer, No! Why? Because of Wellington? Because of Blücher? No! Because of God! For Bonaparte to conquer at Waterloo was not the law of the nineteenth century. It was time that this vast man should fall. He had been impeached before the Infinite! He had vexed God! Waterloo was not a battle. It was the change of front of the Universe!”

Victor Hugo

"The Battle of Waterloo", reported in Oliver Ernesto Branch, ed., The Hamilton Speaker (1878), p. 53

God , Law , Universe , Change

“God became a man, granted. The devil became a woman.”

Victor Hugo

Dieu s'est fait homme; soit. Le diable s'est fait femme!
Ruy Blas (1838), Act II, Scene V http://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Ruy_Blas#ACTE_2_SCENE_5

God

“On the day when the human conscience shall lose its bearings, on the day when success shall carry the day before that forum, all will be at an end. The last moral gleam will reascend to heaven. Darkness will be in the mind of man. You will have nothing to do but to devour one another, wild beasts that you are!”

Victor Hugo

Napoleon the Little (1852), Conclusion, Part First, III
Napoleon the Little (1852)

Success

“There is... always, in a large population like that of France, a class which is ignorant, which suffers, covets, and struggles, placed between the brutish instinct which impels it to take, and the moral law which invites it to labour. In the grievous and oppressed condition in which it still is, this class, in order to maintain itself in probity and well-doing, requires all the pure and holy light that emanates from the Gospel; it requires that, on the one hand, the spirit of Jesus Christ, and, on the other, the spirit of the French Revolution, should address to it the same manly words, and should never cease to point out to it, as the only lights worthy of the eyes of man, the exalted and mysterious laws of human destiny,—self-denial, devotion, sacrifice, the labour which leads to material well-being, the probity which leads to inward well-being; even with this perennial instruction, at once divine and human, this class, so worthy of sympathy and fraternity, often succumbs.”

Victor Hugo

Napoleon the Little (1852), Conclusion, Part First, III
Napoleon the Little (1852)

Law , Light , Suffering , Self-confidence

“If it should happen some day that a man, having in his hand the five hundred thousand officeholders who constitute the government, and the four hundred thousand soldiers composing the army, if it should happen that this man should tear up the Constitution, should violate every law, break every oath, trample upon every right, commit every crime, do you know what your irremovable magistrates, instructors in the right, and guardians of the law, would do? They would hold their tongues.”

Victor Hugo

Napoleon the Little (1852), Book VIII, IV
Napoleon the Little (1852)

Tear , Law

“Be proud, Frenchmen! Lift high your heads, Frenchmen! You are no longer anything, and this man is everything! He holds in his hand your intelligence, as a child holds a bird. Any day he pleases, he can strangle the genius of France.”

Victor Hugo

Napoleon the Little (1852), Book V, IX
Napoleon the Little (1852)

Bird , Intelligence

“This tribune was the terror of every tyranny and fanaticism, it was the hope of every one who was oppressed under Heaven. Whoever placed his foot upon that height, felt distinctly the pulsations of the great heart of mankind. There, providing he was a man of earnest purpose, his soul swelled within him, and shone without. A breath of universal philanthropy seized him, and filled his mind as the breeze fills the sail; so long as his feet rested upon those four planks, he was a stronger and a better man; he felt at that consecrated minute as if he were living the life of all the nations; words of charity for all men came to his lips; beyond the Assembly, grouped at his feet, and frequently in a tumult, he beheld the people, attentive, serious, with ears strained, and fingers on lips; and beyond the people, the human race, plunged in thought, seated in circles, and listening.”

Victor Hugo

Napoleon the Little (1852), Book V, V
Napoleon the Little (1852)

Soul , Hope , Heart , People

“We who combat them are "the eternal enemies of order.". We are—for they can as yet find nothing but this worn-out word—we are demagogues. In the language of the Duke of Alva, to believe in the sacredness of the human conscience, to resist the Inquisition, to brave the state for one's faith, to draw the sword for one's country, to defend one's worship, one's city, one's home, one's house, one's family, and one's God, was called vagabondism... The man is a demagogue in the nineteenth century, who in the sixteenth would have been a vagabond.”

Victor Hugo

Book II, XI
Napoleon the Little (1852)

Family , God , Drawing , Faith

“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