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Language
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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.
-Victor Hugo
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Laughter
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Laughter is the sun that drives winter from the human face.
-Victor Hugo
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Laziness
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A man is not idle because he is absorbed in thought. There is visible labor and there is invisible labor.
-Victor Hugo
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Libraries
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A library implies an act of faith.
-Victor Hugo
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Life
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Those who live are those who fight.
-Victor Hugo
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Life is a flower of which love is the honey.
-Victor Hugo
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Listening
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When a woman is speaking to you, listen to what she says with her eyes.
-Victor Hugo
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Literary
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Prometheus is action. Hamlet is hesitation. In Prometheus the obstacle is exterior; in Hamlet it is interior. In Prometheus the will is securely nailed down by nails of brass and cannot get loose; besides, it has by its side two watchers
-Victor Hugo
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Love
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The supreme happiness in life is the conviction that we are loved.
-Victor Hugo
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The supreme happiness in life is the conviction that we are loved -- loved for ourselves, or rather, loved in spite of ourselves.
-Victor Hugo
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I met in the street a very poor young man who was in love. His hat was old, his coat worn, his cloak was out at the elbows, the water passed through his shoes -- and the stars through his soul.
-Victor Hugo
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Life is the flower for which love is the honey.
-Victor Hugo
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To love another person is to see the face of God. Les Miserables
-Victor Hugo
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Men & Women
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God created the flirt as soon as he made the fool.
-Victor Hugo
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Mistakes
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The greatest blunders, like the thickest ropes, are often compounded of a multitude of strands.
-Victor Hugo
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Music
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Music expresses that which can not be said and on which it is impossible to be silent
-Victor Hugo
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Nation, Nationality, Nationalism
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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.
-Victor Hugo
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Nature
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The mountains, the forest, and the sea, render men savage; they develop the fierce, but yet do not destroy the human.
-Victor Hugo
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Planning
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He, who every morning plans the transactions of the day, and follows that plan, carries a thread that will guide him through a labyrinth of the most busy life.
-Victor Hugo
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Each man should frame life so that at some future hour fact and his dreaming meet.
-Victor Hugo
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Potential
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Where the telescope ends, the microscope begins. Which of the two has the grander view?
-Victor Hugo
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Poverty
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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.
-Victor Hugo
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Praise
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A compliment is something like a kiss through a veil.
-Victor Hugo, Les Mis, 1862
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Prayer
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Certain thoughts are prayers. There are moments when, whatever be the attitude of the body, the soul is on its knees.
-Victor Hugo
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Prison
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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?
-Victor Hugo
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Books by and about Victor Hugo