Victor Hugo Quotes

We're all born lost, aren't we? We're all born separated from God - over and over life makes sure to inform us of this - and yet we're all real: we have names, we have lives. We mean something. We must.

Is it easier for a man to live his life again as a fish, than to accept the wonder of being human? So alone, so frightened, so wanting for what we are afraid to give tongue to.

Because we are in the world, we are condemned to meaning, and we cannot do or say anything without its acquiring a name in history.

How poor, how rich, how abject, how august, how complicate, how wonderful is man! Distinguished link in being's endless chain! Midway from nothing to the Deity! Dim miniature of greatness absolute! An heir of glory! A frail child of dust! Helpless immortal! Insect infinite! A worm! A God!

People? People are chaotic quiddities living in one cave each. They pass the hours in amorous grudge and playback and thought experiment. At the campfire they put the usual fraction on exhibit, and listen to their own silent gibber about how they're feeling and how they're going down. We've been there. Death helps. Death gives us something to do. Because it's a fulltime job looking the other way.

Man is born to live, to suffer, and to die, and what befalls him is a tragic lot. There is no denying this in the final end. But we must deny it all along the way.

The right to happiness is fundamental; men live so little time and die alone.

Music is only a means to an end - it is not the end. The concern is with the condition of man

Man's greatest concern is to know how he shall properly fill his place in the universe and correctly understand what he must be in order to be a man.

Man is equally incapable of seeing the nothingness from which he emerges and the infinity in which he is engulfed.

We can have our own choices in sex partners, but you cannot avoid birth and death. It's the content of all religion and art. We familiarize them and if we're more honest, we'd be far more relaxed about them.

If people are living their lives for security and comfort and pleasure, then mind's every waking moment will be plotting those things. That's how it stays identified - as a body, as a you.

I finally did not understand if we are living to survive or we are living to die!

Strange is our situation here on earth. Each of us comes for a short visit, not knowing why, yet sometimes seeming to divine a purpose.

I am continually trying to find meaning in the world. If we cannot find some ultimate significance or value in our lives, we fall very easily into despair.

By all evidence we are in the world to do nothing; but instead of nonchalantly promenading our own corruption, we exude our sweat and grow winded upon the fetid air.

So why would you care To get out of this place? You and me and all our friends, Such a happy human race. Eat, drink and be merry, For tomorrow we die.

People don't live or die, people just float.

Whenever I hear about a child needing something, I ask myself, 'Is it what he needs or what he wants?' It isn't always easy to distinguish between the two. A child has many real needs which can and should be satisfied. His wants are a bottomless pit. He wants, for example, to sleep with his parents. He needs to be in his own bed. At Christmas he wants every toy advertised on television. He needs only one or two.

Lives based on having are less free than lives based either on doing or being.

What you call man is time.

When childhood dies, its corpses are called adults and they enter society, one of the politer names of hell. That is why we dread children, even if we love them, they show us the state of our decay.

Death left its old tragic heaven and became the lyrical core of man: his invisible truth, his visible secret.

When one read's Kierkegaard's profound analyses of anxiety and despair or Nietzsche's amazingly acute insights into the dynamics of resentment and the guilt and hostility which accompany repressed emotional powers, one might pinch oneself to realize that one is reading works written in the last century and not some new contemporary psychological analysis.

Two separate beings, in different circumstances, face to face in freedom and seeking justification of their existence through one another, will always live an adventure full of risk and promise." (p. 248)