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There have been in this century only one great man and one great thing: Napoleon and liberty. For want of the great man, let us have the great thing.

Victor Hugo

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Victor Hugo
Age: 83 †
Born: 1802
Born: February 26
Died: 1885
Died: May 22
Drawer
Essayist
Illustrator
Librettist
Memoirist
Novelist
Playwright
Poet
Politician
Travel Writer
Writer
Besac
Victor Marie Hugo
Victor-Marie Hugo
Victor Marie
Comte Hugo
Liberty
Great
Thing
Men
Napoleon
Century

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The holy law of Jesus Christ governs our civilisation, but it does not yet permeate it.
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Melancholy is the happiness of being sad.
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One can no more keep the mind from returning to an idea than the sea from returning to a shore. For a sailor, this is called the tide in the case of the guilty it is called remorse. God stirs up the soul as well as the ocean.
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We should judge a man much more surely from what he dreams than from what he thinks.
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Don't educate your children to be rich. Educate them to be happy, so they know the value of things, not the price.
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Human intelligence discovered a way of perpetuating itself, one not only more durable and more resistant than architecture, but also simpler and easier. Architecture was dethroned. The stone letters of Orpheus gave way to the lead letters of Gutenburg. The book will kill the edifice.
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Curiosity is gluttony. To see is to devour.
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Nothing is more imminent than the impossible . . . what we must always foresee is the unforeseen.
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To meditate is to labour to think is to act.
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In every cradle decked with rosy wreath Lurk germs of death.
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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.
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To live a life which is a perpetual falsehood is to suffer unknown tortures.
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Is there not in every human soul a primitive spark, a divine element, incorruptible in this world and immortal in the next, which can be developed by goodness, kindled, lit up, and made to radiate, and which evil can never entirely extinguish.
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When a man understands the art of seeing, he can trace the spirit of an age and the features of a king even in the knocker on a door.
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You are adorable, mademoiselle. I study your feet with the microscope and your soul with the telescope.
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Style is the substance of the subject called unceasingly to the surface.
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The poor man shuddered, overflowed with an angelic joy he declared in his transport that this would last through life he said to himself that he really had not suffered enough to deserve such radiant happiness, and he thanked God, in the depths of his soul, for having permitted that he, a miserable man, should be so loved by this innocent being.
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Superstitions, bigotries, hypocrisies, prejudices, these phantoms, phantoms though they be, cling to life they have teeth and nails in their shadowy substance, and we must grapple with them individually and make war on them without truce for it is one of humanity's inevitabilities to be condemned to eternal struggle with phantoms.
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When the heart is dry the eye is dry.
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True or false, that which is said of men often occupies as important a place in their lives, and above all in their destinies, as that which they do.
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