Victor Hugo quotes - Page : 5

" 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. " # Desperation # Law and Lawyers # Friends and Friendship

" Genius is a promontory jutting out into the infinite. " # Genius # Freedom # Power

" There are thoughts which are prayers. There are moments when, whatever the posture of the body, the soul is on its knees. " # Prayer # Love # Body

" 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. " # Progress # Thoughts and Thinking # Death and Dying

" My tastes are aristocratic, my actions democratic. " # Taste # Action # Politicians and Politics

" Separated lovers cheat absence by a thousand fancies which have their own reality. They are prevented from seeing one another and they cannot write; nevertheless they find countless mysterious ways of corresponding, by sending each other the song of birds, the scent of flowers, the laughter of children, the light of the sun, the sighing of the wind, and the gleam of the stars --all the beauties of creation. " # Absence # Love # Laughter

" 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. " # Contemplation # Work # Idleness

" Have courage for the great sorrows of life, and patience for the small ones. When you have laboriously accomplished your daily tasks, go to sleep in peace. God is awake. " # Courage # Patience # Peace

" Wherever the Turkish hoof trods, no grass grows. " # Politicians and Politics

" What is grace? It is the inspiration from on high: it is love; it is liberty. Grace is the spirit of law. This discovery of the spirit of law belongs to Saint Paul; and what he calls "grace" from a heavenly point of view, we, from an earthly point, call "rigtheousness." " # Liberty