Kathryn Vanden > Kathryn's Quotes

“[T]he only place on earth where immortality is provided is in libraries. This is the collective memory of humanity.”
― Temple Grandin, Thinking In Pictures: and Other Reports from My Life with Autism

“The boundaries which divide Life from Death are at best shadowy and vague. Who shall say where the one ends, and where the other begins?”
― Edgar Allan Poe, The Premature Burial

“Even in the grave, all is not lost.”
― Edgar Allan Poe

“You are not wrong who deem
That my days have been a dream;
Yet if hope has flown away
In a night, or in a day,
In a vision, or in none,
Is it therefore the less gone?
All that we see or seem
Is but a dream within a dream.”
― Edgar Allen Poe

“Music expresses that which cannot be put into words and that which cannot remain silent”
― Victor Hugo

“Even the darkest night will end and the sun will rise.”
― Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

“It is nothing to die. It is frightful not to live.”
― Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

“Have courage for the great sorrows of life and patience for the small ones; and when you have laboriously accomplished your daily task, go to sleep in peace. God is awake.”
― Victor Hugo

“Not being heard is no reason for silence.”
― Hugo, Victor, Les Misérables

“Reason is intelligence taking exercise. Imagination is intelligence with an erection.”
― Victor Hugo

“You ask me what forces me to speak? a strange thing; my conscience.”
― Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

“The future has several names. For the weak, it is impossible; for the fainthearted, it is unknown; but for the valiant, it is ideal.”
― Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

“The pupil dilates in darkness and in the end finds light, just as the soul dilates in misfortune and in the end finds God.”
― Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

“If you wish to understand what Revolution is, call it Progress; and if you wish to understand what Progress is, call it Tomorrow.”
― Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

“Let us sacrifice one day to gain perhaps a whole life.”
― Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

“So long as there shall exist, by reason of law and custom, a social condemnation which, in the midst of civilization, artificially creates a hell on earth, and complicates with human fatality a destiny that is divine; so long as the three problems of the century - the degradation of man by the exploitation of his labour, the ruin of women by starvation and the atrophy of childhood by physical and spiritual night are not solved; so long as, in certain regions, social asphyxia shall be possible; in other words and from a still broader point of view, so long as ignorance and misery remain on earth, there should be a need for books such as this.”
― Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

“Diamonds are to be found only in the darkness of the earth, and truth in the darkness of the mind. ”
― Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

“The paradise of the rich is made out of the hell of the poor.”
― Victor Hugo, The Man Who Laughs

“The quantity of civilization is measured by the quality of imagination.”
― Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

“Should we continue to look upwards? Is the light we can see in the sky one of those which will presently be extinguished? The ideal is terrifying to behold... brilliant but threatened on all sides by the dark forces that surround it: nevertheless, no more in danger than a star in the jaws of the clouds.”
― Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

“Gentlemen of the human race, I say to hell with the lot of you.”
― Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

“Nothing is more powerful than an idea whose time has come.”
― Victor Hugo

“Happiness lies for those who cry, those who hurt, those who have searched, and those who have tried for only they can appreciate the importance of people who have touched their lives.”
― Victor Hugo

“In fact, were it given to our human eye to see into the consciences of others, we would judge a man much more surely from what he dreams than from what he thinks. There is will in the thought, there is none in the dream. Even in the gigantic and the ideal, the dream, which is completely spontaneous, takes and keeps the form of our mind. Nothing springs more directly and more sincerely from our innermost souls than our unreflected and indefinite aspirations, much more than in ideas, which are structured, studied, and compared, can we find the true character of each man. Our chimeras are most like us. Each of us dreams the unknown and the impossible according to his own nature.”
― Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

“He who contemplates the depths of Paris is seized with vertigo.
Nothing is more fantastic. Nothing is more tragic.
Nothing is more sublime.”
― Victor Hugo

“The human soul has still greater need of the ideal than of the real. It is by the real that we exist, it is by the ideal that we live.”
― Victor Hugo

“Another story must begin!”
― Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

“Yes, the brutalities of progress are called revolutions. When they are over, this is recognised: that the human race has been harshly treated, but that it has advanced.”
― Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

“A cannonball travels only two thousand miles an hour; light travels two hundred thousand miles a second. Such is the superiority of Jesus Christ over Napoleon.”
― Victor Hugo

“there is a point when the unfortunate and the infamous are associated and confused in a word, a mortal word, les miserables”
― Victor Hugo, Les Misérables