Quotes By Victor Hugo, 1802-85; a French poet, dramatist, novelist.
"Popularity? It's glory's small change."  Don Salluste, in Ruy Blas, act 3, sc. 5.
"To learn to read is to light a fire; every syllable that is spelled out is a spark." Les Misérables, pt. 4, bk. 7, ch. 1 (1862).
"A compliment is something like a kiss through a veil."  Les Misérables, "Saint Denis," bk. 8, ch. 1 (1862).
"Close by the Rights of Man, at the least set beside them, are the Rights of the Spirit."  Les Misérables, pt. 2, bk. 7, ch. 5 (1862).
"The three great problems of this century, the degradation of man in the proletariat, the subjection of women through hunger, the atrophy of the child by darkness." Les Misérables, Preface (1862).
"One is not idle because one is absorbed. There is both visible and invisible labor. To contemplate is to toil, to think is to do. The crossed arms work, the clasped hands act. The eyes upturned to Heaven are an act of creation." Les Misérables, pt. 2, bk. 7, ch. 8 (1862).
"The brutalities of progress are called revolutions. When they are over we realize this: that the human race has been roughly handled, but that it has advanced."  The old revolutionary, in Les Misérables, pt. 1, bk. 1, ch. 10 (1862).
"We say that slavery has vanished from European civilization, but this is not true. Slavery still exists, but now it applies only to women and its name is prostitution."  Les Misérables, pt. 1, bk. 5, ch. 11 (1862).
"A saint addicted to excessive self-abnegation is a dangerous associate; he may infect you with poverty, and a stiffening of those joints which are needed for advancement—in a word, with more renunciation than you care for—and so you flee the contagion."  Les Misérables, pt. 1, bk. 1, ch. 12 (1862).
"There are thoughts which are prayers. There are moments when, whatever the posture of the body, the soul is on its knees."  Marius, in Les Misérables, pt. 4, bk. 5, ch. 4 (1862).
"It is the essence of truth that it is never excessive. Why should it exaggerate? There is that which should be destroyed and that which should be simply illuminated and studied. How great is the force of benevolent and searching examination! We must not resort to the flame where only light is required." Les Misérables, pt. 2, bk. 7, ch. 3 (1862).
"A creditor is worse than a slave-owner; for the master owns only your person, but a creditor owns your dignity, and can command it." Marius, in Les Misérables, "Marius," bk. 5, ch. 2.
Jesus wept; Voltaire smiled. From that divine tear and from that human smile is derived the grace of present civilization." "Centenaire de Voltaire," address, 30 May 1878, on the centenary of Voltaire's death.
The convent, which belongs to the West as it does to the East, to antiquity as it does to the present time, to Buddhism and Muhammadanism as it does to Christianity, is one of the optical devices whereby man gains a glimpse of infinity. Les Misérables, pt. 2, bk. 7, ch. 1 (1862).
"In this world, which is so plainly the antechamber of another, there are no happy men. The true division of humanity is between those who live in light and those who live in darkness. Our aim must be to diminish the number of the latter and increase the number of the former. That is why we demand education and knowledge."  Les Misérables, pt. 4, bk. 7, ch. 1 (1862).
"All roads are blocked to a philosophy which reduces everything to the word "no." To "no" there is only one answer and that is "yes." Nihilism has no substance. There is no such thing as nothingness, and zero does not exist. Everything is something. Nothing is nothing. Man lives more by affirmation than by bread." Les Misérables, pt. 2, bk. 7, ch. 6 (1862).
"Do not ask the name of the person who seeks a bed for the night. He who is reluctant to give his name is the one who most needs shelter." Bienvenu Myriel, the bishop of Digne, in Les Misérables, pt. 1, bk. 1, ch. 6 (1862).
"Progress is the life-style of man. The general life of the human race is called Progress, and so is its collective march. Progress advances, it makes the great human and earthly journey towards what is heavenly and divine; it has its pauses, when it rallies the stragglers, its stopping places when it meditates, contemplating some new and splendid promised land that has suddenly appeared on its horizon. It has its nights of slumber; and it is one of the poignant anxieties of the thinker to see the human spirit lost in shadow, and to grope in the darkness without being able to awake sleeping progress." Les Misérables, pt. 5, bk. 1, ch. 20 (1862).
"The greatest blunders, like the thickest ropes, are often compounded of a multitude of strands. Take the rope apart, separate it into the small threads that compose it, and you can break them one by one. You think, "That is all there was!" But twist them all together and you have something tremendous." Les Misérables, pt. 2, bk. 5, ch. 10 (1862).
"Nations, like stars, are entitled to eclipse. All is well, provided the light returns and the eclipse does not become endless night. Dawn and resurrection are synonymous. The reappearance of the light is the same as the survival of the soul." Les Misérables, pt. 5, bk. 1, ch. 20 (1862).
"There exists, at the bottom of all abasement and misfortune, a last extreme which rebels and joins battle with the forces of law and respectability in a desperate struggle, waged partly by cunning and partly by violence, at once sick and ferocious, in which it attacks the prevailing social order with the pin-pricks of vice and the hammer-blows of crime." Les Misérables, pt. 4, bk. 7, ch. 1 (1862).
"Let us have compassion for those under chastisement. Alas, who are we ourselves? Who am I and who are you? Whence do we come and is it quite certain that we did nothing before we were born? This earth is not without some resemblance to a gaol. Who knows but that man is a victim of divine justice? Look closely at life. It is so constituted that one senses punishment everywhere."  Les Misérables, pt. 4, bk. 7, ch. 1 (1862).
"There is a sacred horror about everything grand. It is easy to admire mediocrity and hills; but whatever is too lofty, a genius as well as a mountain, an assembly as well as a masterpiece, seen too near, is appalling." Ninety-Three, pt. 2, bk. 3, ch. 1 (1879).
"It is not enough for us to prostrate ourselves under the tree which is Creation, and to contemplate its tremendous branches filled with stars. We have a duty to perform, to work upon the human soul, to defend the mystery against the miracle, to worship the incomprehensible while rejecting the absurd; to accept, in the inexplicable, only what is necessary; to dispel the superstitions that surround religion—to rid God of His Maggots." Les Misérables, pt. 2, bk. 7, ch. 5 (1862).
"From the oyster to the eagle, from the swine to the tiger, all animals are to be found in men and each of them exists in some man, sometimes several at the time. Animals are nothing but the portrayal of our virtues and vices made manifest to our eyes, the visible reflections of our souls. God displays them to us to give us food for thought." Les Misérables, pt. 1, bk. 5, ch. 5 (1862).
"We are on the side of religion as opposed to religions, and we are among those who believe in the wretched inadequacy of sermons and the sublimity of prayer."  Les Misérables, pt. 2, bk. 7, ch. 8 (1862).
"Superstition, bigotry and prejudice, ghosts though they are, cling tenaciously to life; they are shades armed with tooth and claw. They must be grappled with unceasingly, for it is a fateful part of human destiny that it is condemned to wage perpetual war against ghosts. A shade is not easily taken by the throat and destroyed." Les Misérables, pt. 2, bk. 7, ch. 3 (1862).
"Whenever we encounter the Infinite in man, however imperfectly understood, we treat it with respect. Whether in the synagogue, the mosque, the pagoda, or the wigwam, there is a hideous aspect which we execrate and a sublime aspect which we venerate. So great a subject for spiritual contemplation, such measureless dreaming—the echo of God on the human wall!" Les Misérables, pt. 2, bk. 7, ch. 1 (1862).
"One cannot be a good historian of the outward, visible world without giving some thought to the hidden, private life of ordinary people; and on the other hand one cannot be a good historian of this inner life without taking into account outward events where these are relevant. They are two orders of fact which reflect each other, which are always linked and which sometimes provoke each other." Les Misérables, pt. 4, bk. 7, ch. 1 (1862).
"The book which the reader now holds in his hands, from one end to the other, as a whole and in its details, whatever gaps, exceptions, or weaknesses it may contain, treats of the advance from evil to good, from injustice to justice, from falsity to truth, from darkness to daylight, from blind appetite to conscience, from decay to life, from bestiality to duty, from Hell to Heaven, from limbo to God. Matter itself is the starting-point, and the point of arrival is the soul. Hydra at the beginning, an angel at the end." Les Misérables, pt. 5, bk. 1, ch. 20 (1862).
"Most commonly revolt is born of material circumstances; but insurrection is always a moral phenomenon. Revolt is Masaniello, who led the Neapolitan insurgents in 1647; but insurrection is Spartacus. Insurrection is a thing of the spirit, revolt is a thing of the stomach." Les Misérables, pt. 4, bk. 10, ch. 2 (1862).
"Despots play their part in the works of thinkers. Fettered words are terrible words. The writer doubles and trebles the power of his writing when a ruler imposes silence on the people. Something emerges from that enforced silence, a mysterious fullness which filters through and becomes steely in the thought. Repression in history leads to conciseness in the historian, and the rocklike hardness of much celebrated prose is due to the tempering of the tyrant." Les Misérables, pt. 4, bk. 10 ch. 2 (1862).
"Justice has its anger, my lord Bishop, and the wrath of justice is an element of progress. Whatever else may be said of it, the French Revolution was the greatest step forward by mankind since the coming of Christ. It was unfinished, I agree, but still it was sublime. It released the untapped springs of society; it softened hearts, appeased, tranquilized, enlightened, and set flowing through the world the tides of civilization. It was good. The French Revolution was the anointing of humanity. The old revolutionary, in Les Misérables, pt. 1, bk. 1, ch. 10 (1862).
"Such is the remorseless progression of human society, shedding lives and souls as it goes on its way. It is an ocean into which men sink who have been cast out by the law and consigned, with help most cruelly withheld, to moral death. The sea is the pitiless social darkness into which the penal system casts those it has condemned, an unfathomable waste of misery. The human soul, lost in those depths, may become a corpse. Who shall revive it?" Les Misérables, pt. 1, bk. 2, ch. 8 (1862).
"Monasticism, as it existed in Spain and still exists in Tibet, is a wasting disease of civilization. It puts a stop to life. Quite simply, it depopulates. Claustration is castration. It has been the scourge of Europe. Add to this the violence so often inflicted on the conscience, the enforced vocations . . . the closed mouths and minds, so much intelligence condemned to the imprisonment of vows for life, the burial of living souls. No matter who you are, the thought of so much suffering and degradation must cause you to shudder at the sight of a veil or cassock, those two shrouds of human invention." Les Misérables, pt. 2, bk. 7, ch. 3 (1862).
"The Parisian is to the French what the Athenian was to the Greeks: no one sleeps better than he, no one is more openly frivolous and idle, no one appears more heedless. But this is misleading. He is given to every kind of listlessness, but when there is glory to be won he may be inspired with every kind of fury. Give him a pike and he will enact the tenth of August, a musket and you have Austerlitz. He was the springboard of Napoleon and the mainstay of Danton. At the cry of "la patrie" he enrols, and at the call of liberty he tears up the pavements. Beware of him!" Les Misérables, pt. 1, bk. 3, ch. 5 (1862).
"Nothing can be more depressing than to expose, naked to the light of thought, the hideous growth of argot. Indeed it is like a sort of repellent animal intended to dwell in darkness which has been dragged out of its cloaca. One seems to see a horned and living creature viciously struggling to be restored to the place where it belongs. One word is like a claw, another like a sightless and bleeding eye; and there are phrases which clutch like the pincers of a crab. And all of it is alive with the hideous vitality of things that have organized themselves amid disorganization." Les Misérables, pt. 4, bk. 7, ch. 1 (1862).
"The mountains, the forest, and the sea, render men savage; they develop the fierce, but yet do not destroy the human." Les Misérables, bk. 2, ch. 6, "Fantine" (1862).
"We may remark in passing that to be blind and beloved may, in this world where nothing is perfect, be among the most strangely exquisite forms of happiness. . . . The supreme happiness in life is the assurance of being loved; of being loved for oneself, even in spite of oneself; and this assurance the blind man possesses. In his affliction, to be served is to be caressed. Does he lack anything? no. Possessing love he is not deprived of light. A love, moreover, that is wholly pure. There can be no blindness where there is this certainty." Les Misérables, pt. 1, bk. 5, ch. 4 (1862).
"Mankind is not a circle with a single center but an ellipse with two focal points of which facts are one and ideas the other." Les Misérables, pt. 4, bk. 7, ch. 1 (1862).
"France is a people of the same quality as Greece and Italy. She is Athenian in beauty and Roman in grandeur. Moreover, she is generous. She gives herself. More often than other peoples, she knows the mood of devotion and sacrifice. But it is a mood that comes and goes; and this is the great danger for those who seek to run when she is content to walk, and to walk when she wishes to stay still. France has her relapses into materialism, and at certain moments the ideas which obstruct the working of her splendid mind contain nothing that recalls her greatness but are rather of the dimensions of Missouri or some other southern state. What can be done about it? The giantess plays the dwarf; great France has her fantasies of smallness. That is all." Les Misérables, pt. 5, bk. 1, ch. 20 (1862).