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Idleness, pleasure, what abysses! To do nothing is a dreary course to take, be sure of it. To live idle upon the substance of society! To be useless, that is to say, noxious! This leads straight to the lowest depth of misery.

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
Upon
Straight
Dreary
Live
Depth
Idleness
Nothing
Misery
Abyss
Take
Courses
Lowest
Course
Idle
Pleasure
Substance
Sure
Useless
Abysses
Society
Leads
Noxious

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Strong and rare natures are thus created misery, almost always a stepmother, is sometimes a mother privation gives birth to power of soul and mind distress is the nurse of self-respect misfortune is a good breast for great souls.
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Progress is the life-style of man.
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Thus, during those nineteen years of torture and slavery, did this soul rise and fall at the same time. Light entered on the one side, and darkness on the other.
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Intelligence is the wife, imagination is the mistress, memory is the servant.
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Not seeing people permits us to imagine them with every perfection.
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Life is the flower for which love is the honey.
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By putting forward the hands of the clock you shall not advance the hour.
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The ode lives upon the ideal, the epic upon the grandiose, the drama upon the real.
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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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Happiness wishes everybody happy.
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God whose gifts in gracious flood Unto all who seek are sent, Only asks you to be good And is content.
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You say, Where goest Thou? I cannot tell, And still go on. But if the way be straight I cannot go amiss: before me lies Dawn and the day: the night behind me: that Suffices me: I break the bounds: I see, And nothing more believe and nothing less. My future is not one of my concerns.
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Love resembles a tree: it bends under its own weight, deeply rooted in our being and sometimes turns green in the ruins of a heart.
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...We pray together, we are afraid together, and then we go to sleep. Even if Satan came into the house, no one would interfere. After all, what is there to fear in this house? There is always one with us who is the strongest. Satan may visit our house, but the good Lord lives here.
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For there are many great deeds done in the small struggles of life.
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Brothers, he who dies here dies in the radiance of the future, and we are entering a tomb all flooded with the dawn.
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The drama is complete poetry. The ode and the epic contain it only in germ it contains both of them in a state of high development, and epitomizes both.
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His universal compassion was due less to natural instinct, than to a profound conviction, a sum of thoughts that in the course of living had filtered through to his heart: for in the nature of man, as in rock, there may be channels hollowed by the dropping of water, and these can never be destroyed.
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You have enemies? Why, it is the story of every man who has done a great deed or created a new idea.
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