Victor Hugo Quotes

He who is in evil, is also in the punishment of evil.

I did not bow down to you, I bowed down to all the suffering of humanity.

Even the wicked get worse than they deserve.

Don't let us rejoice in punishment, even when the hand of God alone inflicts it. The best of us are but poor wretches, just saved from shipwreck. Can we feel anything but awe and pity when we see a fellow-passenger swallowed by the waves?

Some things come with their own punishments.

...the counsels of the Divine Mind had some glimpse of truth when they said that men are born in order to suffer the penalty for sins committed in a former life.

Whatever our creed, we feel that no good deed can by any possibility go unrewarded, no evil deed unpunished.

It is right that the good should be happy, that the wicked and the impious on the other hand, should be miserable; that is a truth, I believe, which no one will gainsay.

Mercy is "stronger and more God-like than vengeance".

Every sin provokes its punishment.

Love and knowledge, so far as they were possible, led upward toward the heavens. But always pity brought me back to earth. Echoes of cries of pain reverberate in my heart. Children in famine, victims tortured by oppressors, helpless old people a burden to their sons, and the whole world of loneliness, poverty, and pain make a mockery of what human life should be. I long to alleviate this evil, but I cannot, and I too suffer.

Even when a person suffers pain in consequence of a thorn having entered into his hand, although it is at once drawn out, it is a punishment that has been inflicted on him, and the least pleasure he enjoys is a reward; all this is meted out by strict justice; as is said in the Scripture, "all His ways are judgement" (Deut. xxxii. 4); we are only ignorant of the working of that judgement.

It is important not to allow ourselves to be put off by the magnitude of others' suffering. The misery of millions is not a cause for pity. Rather it is a cause for compassion.

Compassion asks us to go where it hurts, to enter into the places of pain, to share in brokenness, fear, confusion, and anguish. Compassion challenges us to cry out with those in misery, to mourn with those who are lonely, to weep with those in tears. Compassion requires us to be weak with the weak, vulnerable with the vulnerable, and powerless with the powerless. Compassion means full immersion in the condition of being human.

There is no immunity from the consequences of sin; punishment is swift and sure to one and all.

Every sin brings its punishment with it.

When so many of our dreams had come true and yet I still saw that so many of my friends were in a lot of pain... I saw their pain from a different perspective and realized that I can't just sing my way out of all this suffering. I have to try to understand human nature and myself and the nature of suffering and a lot of these other issues on a deeper level.

O poor mortals, how ye make this earth bitter for each other.

You do not like to suffer yourself. How can you inflict suffering on others?

He who makes his law a curse, by his own law shall surely die.

Fine words lack all meaning when we are confronted by real suffering.

In the face of suffering, one has no right to turn away, not to see. In the face of injustice, one may not look the other way. When someone suffers, and it is not you, that person comes first. One's very suffering gives one priority. . . . To watch over one who grieves is a more urgent duty than to think of God.

There is in Aristotle an almost complete absence of what may be called benevolence or philanthropy. The sufferings of mankind . . . there is no evidence that they cause him unhappiness except when the sufferers happen to be his friends.

Nothing but the infinite Pity is sufficient for the infinite pathos of human life.

Poverty, disease, sorrow, imprisonment and other evils are the fruits borne by the tree of one's own sins.