Victor Hugo Quotes
Mankind is not a circle with a single center but an ellipse with two focal points of which facts are one and ideas the other.
Hugo, Victor. Les Misérables. Translated by Charles E. Wilbour, Carleton, 1862.
Most people are surprised that this is a reality of something like physics although sophisticated philosophers have been making this point with respect to human relations for many years. Politics is a particularly good example where conflicting realities can both exist at the same time.
This quotation from 1888 is apropos many of the major scientific advances which are counter-intuitive. Relativity was one; another was Quantum Mechanics where we have to learn to accept the fact that something can be in two (or more) places at once or that the exact same forces acting on an object can produce more than one result. Most non-scientists would see these as absurd, but they are basic characteristics of modern physics.
Victor-Marie Hugo was a French poet, novelist, and dramatist of the Romantic movement. During a literary career that spanned more than sixty years, he wrote abundantly in an exceptional variety of genres: lyrics, satires, epics, philosophical poems, epigrams, novels, history, critical essays, political speeches, funeral orations, diaries, letters public and private, as well as dramas in verse and prose.
