Victor Hugo Night Quotations

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.

Strange to say, the luminous world is the invisible world; the luminous world is that which we do not see. Our eyes of flesh see only night.

What is fright by night is curiosity by day.

The peculiarity of sunrise is to make us laugh at all our terrors of the night, and our laugh is always proportioned to the fear we have had.

France lost a great novel last night.

I am in the night. There is a being who has gone away and carried the heavens with her. Oh! to be laid side by side in the same tomb, hand clasped in hand, and from time to time, in the darkness, to caress a finger gently, that would suffice for my eternity.

At that moment of love, a moment when passion is absolutely silent under omnipotence of ecstasy, Marius, pure seraphic Marius, would have been more capable of visiting a woman of the streets than of raising Cosette’s dress above the ankle. Once on a moonlit night, Cosette stopped to pick up something from the ground, her dress loosened and revealed the swelling of her breasts. Marius averted his eyes.

Here we stop. On the threshold of wedding nights stands an angel smiling, a finger to his lips.

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

A library implies an act of faith which generations, still in darkness hid, sign in their night in witness of the dawn.

Whatever causes night in our souls may leave stars. Cimourdain was full of virtues and truth, but they shine out of a dark background.

To gaze into the depths of the sea is, in the imagination, like beholding the vast unknown, and from its most terrible point of view. The submarine gulf is analogous to the realm of night and dreams. There also is sleep, unconsciousness, or at least apparent unconsciousness, of creation. There in the awful silence and darkness, the rude first forms of life, phantomlike, demoniacal, pursue their horrible instincts.

And if it happened to be a Christmas-night when the great bell seemed to rattle in its throat as it called the faithful to the midnight mass, there was such an indescribable air of life spread over the sombre facade that the great door-way looked as if it were swallowing the entire crowd, and the rose-window staring at them.

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.

Oh Lord! Open the doors of night for me So that I may leave this place and disappear.

Do you hear the people sing Lost in the valley of the night? It is the music of a people Who are climbing to the light. For the wretched of the earth There is a flame that never dies. Even the darkest night will end And the sun will rise.

Night and the day, when united, Bring forth the beautiful light.

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.

O darkness, the sky is a gloomy precinct Whose door you close, and whose key the soul owns; And night divides itself in half, being diabolical and holy, Between Ilis, the black angel, and Christ, the starry Human Being.

Love has no middle term; either it destroys, or it saves. All human destiny is this dilemma. This dilemma, destruction or salvation, no fate proposes more inexorably than love. Love is life, if it is not death. Cradle; coffin, too. The same sentiment says yes and no in the human heart. Of all the things God has made, the human heart is the one that sheds most light, and alas! most night.

It seemed to be a necessary ritual that he should prepare himself for sleep by meditating under the solemnity of the night sky... a mysterious transaction between the infinity of the soul and the infinity of the universe.

Large, heavy, ragged black clouds hung like crape hammocks beneath the starry cope of the night. You would have said that they were the cobwebs of the firmament.

Teach the ignorant as much as you can; society is culpable in not providing a free education for all and it must answer for the night which it produces. If the soul is left in darkness sins will be committed. The guilty one is not he who commits the sin, but he who causes the darkness.

Whatever causes night in our souls may leave stars.

To introduce a new play only six weeks after another has been banned is also a way to speak one's piece to the government. It proves that art and liberty can grow back in one night under the clumsy foot which crushes them.