Grief Quotes by Victor Hugo

20 Grief quotes by Victor Hugo

Victor Hugo’s prose can swell like a cathedral, and his reflections on grief echo that monumental style while staying rooted in personal pain. These 20 lines showcase his ability to turn mourning into a sweeping, almost sacred experience.

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Symmetry is ennui, and ennui is the very essence of grief and melancholy. Despair yawns.

Victor Hugo

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Symmetry is tedious, and tedium is the very basis of mourning. Despair yawns.

Victor Hugo

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Great grief is a divine and terrible radiance which transfigures the wretched.

Victor Hugo

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He sought...to transform the grief which looks down into the grave by showing it the grief which looks up to the stars.

Victor Hugo

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“Nothing chills the heart like symmetry, for symmetry is ennui and ennui is at the heart of grief.”

Victor Hugo

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Desiring always to be in mourning, he clothed himself with night.

Victor Hugo

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It is the peculiarity of grief to bring out the childish side of man.

Victor Hugo

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“As he wished always to appear in mourning, he clothed himself with the night.”

Victor Hugo

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Great griefs exhaust. They discourage us with life. The man into whom they enter feels something taken from him. In youth, their…

Victor Hugo

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“Happy, even in anguish, is he to whom God has given a soul worthy of love and grief! He who has not…

Victor Hugo

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Every day has its great grief or its small anxiety. ... One cloud is dispelled, another forms. There is hardly one day…

Victor Hugo

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He was at his own request and through his own complicity driven out of all his happinesses one after the other; and…

Victor Hugo

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“He believed that faith gives health. He sought to counsel and calm the despairing by pointing out the Man of Resignation, and…

Victor Hugo

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Marius was of the temperament that sinks into grief and remains there; Cosette was of the sort that plunges in and comes…

Victor Hugo

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“She talked thus, bent double, shaken with sobs, blinded by tears, her neck bare, clenching her hands, coughing with a dry and…

Victor Hugo

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“This barricade is made neither of paving stones, nor of timbers, nor of iron; it is made of two mounds, a mound…

Victor Hugo

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“He sought not to efface sorrow by forgetfulness, but to magnify and dignify it by hope. He said:— "Have a care of…

Victor Hugo

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Death has its revelations: the great sorrows which open the heart open the mind as well; light comes to us with our…

Victor Hugo

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“Every torment they had experienced was returned to them an intoxication. It seemed to them that the griefs , the sleeplessness, the…

Victor Hugo

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Youth, even in its sorrows, always has a brilliancy of its own.

Victor Hugo

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Houses are like the human beings that inhabit them.

Victor Hugo

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“There is still a certain grace in a dead festival. It has been happy.”

Victor Hugo

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He caught her, she fell, he caught her in his arms, he held her tightly unconscious of what he was doing. He held her…

Victor Hugo

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“First I loved women, then animals, and now I love stones. They're just as amusing as women and animals and they're much less trecherous.”

Victor Hugo

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Nature is pitiless; she never withdraws her flowers, her music, her fragrance, and her sunlight from before human cruelty or suffering.

Victor Hugo

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“Have courage for the great sorrows of life, and patience for the small ones. And when you have finished your daily task, go to…

Victor Hugo

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The peasants of the Asturias believe that in every litter of wolves there is one pup that is killed by the mother for fear…

Victor Hugo

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Great blunders are often made, like large ropes, of a multitude of fibres.

Victor Hugo

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“For love is like a tree; it grows of itself; it send its roots deep into our being, and often continues to grow green…

Victor Hugo

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“Blacheville smiles with the self-satisfied smugness of a man whose vanity is tickled”

Victor Hugo

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“Loving in ignorance, she loved with all the more passion. She did not know whether it was good or evil, beneficent or dangerous, necessary…

Victor Hugo

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Laughter is the sun that drives winter from the human face.

Victor Hugo

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“Our joys have shadows. The perfect smile belongs to God alone.”

Victor Hugo

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“When those we love are in question, our prudence invents every sort of madness.”

Victor Hugo

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Love is a fault; so be it.

Victor Hugo

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