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Victor Hugo Quotes
1802–1885 France
Victor Marie Hugo (26 February 1802 – 22 May 1885) was a French poet, novelist, and dramatist of the Romantic movement, widely esteemed as one of the greatest of French writers and poets.
France Academics Activists Novelists Playwrights Also known as: Hugo, Hugo, Victor, Hugo, Victor Marie, Victor Marie Hugo
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91 quotes
We declare to you that the earth has exhausted its contingent of master-spirits. Now for decadence and general closing. We must make up our minds to it. We shall have no more men of genius.
The eye was in the tomb and stared at Cain.
For sight is woman-like and shuns the old.
Like our dawn, merely a sob of light.
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.
William Shakespeare (1864)
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 (1879)
Towards three o'clock, the four couples, wild with happiness, were running down to the Russian mountains, a singular edifice which then occupied the heights of fr, and the serpentine line of which might have been perceived above the trees of the Champs Elysées.
Music...is the vapour of art. It is to poetry what revery is to thought, what the fluid is to the liquid, what the ocean of clouds is to the ocean of waves.
William Shakespeare (1864)
Waterloo! Waterloo! Waterloo! Morne plaine!
To rise at six, to sleep at ten,
The nebula is another stellar disc, composed of billions of suns, and constituting the Milky Way of some unknown firmament. Herschel has counted more than two thousand nebulae. Our Milky Way is the dwelling; the nebulae are the city.
This is the battle between day and night... I see black light.
You have created a new thrill.
I represent a party which does not yet exist: the party of revolution, civilization. This party will make the twentieth century. There will issue from it first the United States of Europe, then the United States of the World.
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!"
Letter To M. Daelli on Les Misérables (1862)
The present government is a hand stained with blood, which dips a finger in the holy water. Book II, X
Napoleon the Little (1852)
At certain epochs in history, the whole human race, from all points of the earth, fix their eyes upon some mysterious spot whence it seems that universal destiny is about to issue. Book I, VI
Napoleon the Little (1852)
There are, as we know, powerful and illustrious atheists. At bottom, led back to the truth by their very force, they are not absolutely sure that they are atheists; it is with them only a question of definition, and in any case, if they do not believe in God, being great minds, they prove God.
You insist on the example [of the death penalty]. Why? For what it teaches. What do you want to teach with your example? That thou shalt not kill. And how do you teach thou shalt not kill? By killing.
God in his harmony has equal ends
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