Victor Hugo Quotes

The spirits, they intoxicate me. I watched them infiltrate my soul. They try to say it's too late for me. Once I was promised absolution, there's only one solution for my sins. And I blame this world, for making a good man evil. Now I ain't getting into heaven, if the devil has his way.

The story of Willie Stark fascinated me because it was tackling the story of a man who outwardly has all the success one could possibly want and who is destroyed by his personal demons.

The more conscious I was of goodness and of all that was 'sublime and beautiful,'the more deeply I sank into my mire and the more ready I was to sink in it altogether.

When I run over the frightful catalogue of my sins, I cannot believe that I am the same creature whose thoughts were once filled with sublime and transcendent visions of the beauty and the majesty of goodness. But it is even so; the fallen angel becomes a malignant devil.

Everyone fears and courts his own demon.

I know no man who feels deeper disgust than I do at the ambition, avarice, and profligacy of the priesthood, as well because every one of these vices is odious in itself, as because each of them separately and all of them together are utterly abhorrent in men making profession of a life dedicated to God.

The road to perdition has ever been accompanied by lip service to an ideal.

Lies suck; they tear you apart from the inside out.

Every religion there's something foul going on.

The better day, the worse deed.

America is so terribly grim in spite of all that material prosperity.... Compassion and the old neighborliness have gone, people stand by and do nothing when friends and neighbors are attacked, libeled and ruined. The worst thing is what is done to the children. They are being taught to admire and emulate stool pigeons, to betray and to hate, and all in a sickening atmosphere of religious hypocrisy.

In politics, as in religion, there are devotees who show their reverence for a departed saint by converting his tomb into a sanctuary for crime.

How many priests, pray, are free from whoredom? Nay, how many of their houses are infamous for daily acts of lewdness? How many honorable families do they defile by their vagabond lusts? For my part, I have no pleasure in exposing their vices, and it is no part of my design; but it is of importance to observe what a wide difference there is between the conduct of the priesthood of the present day, and that which true ministers of Christ and his church are bound to pursue.

The enemy is within the gates; it is with our own luxury, our own folly, our own criminality that we have to contend.

Other sins find their vent in the accomplishment of evil deeds, whereas pride lies in wait for good deeds, to destroy them.

As you sell your soul and sow your seeds, and you wound yourself and your loved ones bleed. And your habits grow and your conscience feeds, on all that you thought you should be.

True conviction of sin--how difficult it is, when its appearances and modes of life are so fair, when it twines itself so cunningly about, or creeps so insidiously into, our amiable qualities, and sets off its internal disorders by so many outward charms and attractions.

Now, men think, with regard to their conduct, that, if they were to lift themselves up gigantically and commit some crashing sin, they should never be able to hold up their heads; but they will harbor in their souls little sins, which are piercing and eating them away to inevitable ruin.

Vice is its own reward.

Avalanches of evil begin with a single pebble of sin.

. . . if gold rust, what then will iron do?/ For if a priest be foul in whom we trust/ No wonder that a common man should rust. . . .

What the worm was to the corpse, his sins would be to the painted image on the canvas. They would mar its beauty, and eat away its grace. they would defile it, and make it shameful. And yet the thing would still live on. It would be always alive. (Dorian Gray regarding his portrait)

You may have orthodox heads, and yet you may have the devil in your hearts.

I have no faith in much organized religion because I think it's by a bunch of hypocrites and practiced by a bunch of hypocrites. They don't mean what they say because all of them are in the slave trade one way or the other.

Now I just don't know who to tell to go to hell Who put the old devil in the distorted angel?