Victor Hugo Quotes

people themselves are full of tunnels: winding, dark spaces and caverns; impossible to know all the places inside of them. Impossible even to imagine.

It's interesting if you can talk about the large moments and also the small moments to understand the deepest complexities of a man by trying to imagine who they are.

We are such inward secret creatures, that inwardness is the most amazing thing about us, even more amazing than our reason.

The sphere that is deepest, most unexplored, and most unfathomable, the wonder and glory of God's thought and hand, is our own soul!

We must not always try to plumb the depths of the human heart; the truths it contains are among those that are best seen in half-light or in perspective.

The portion we see of human beings is very small: their formats and faces, voices and words.... beyond these, like an immense dark continent, lies all that has made them.

In [my] life ... I did not understand steam machinery, but I tried to understand that much more complicated piece of mechanism - man.

Man is neither mere intellect not the gross animal body, nor the heart or soul alone.

I am a little world made cunningly.

...the lesson of forever and ever is that knowing a man's mind ain't knowing the man.

If we opened people up, we’d find landscapes.

We knew so little about eachother. We lay mostly submerged, like ice floes with our visible social selves projecting only cool and white. Here was a rare sight below the waves, of a man's privacy and turmoil, of his dignity upended by the overpowering necessity of pure fantasy, pure thought, by the irreducible human element - Mind.

Every man carries a menagerie in himself; and, by stirring him up all around, you will find every sort of animal represented there.

I sometimes feel that I'm impersonating the dark unconscious of the whole human race. I know this sounds sick, but I love it.

I never feel the need to go out and make some grand statement that I'm dark and twisty and complicated, because I'm not that either. It's just not as simple as ponies and rainbows, though I do love ponies and rainbows.

The human soul is an abyss

The heart of man is very much like the sea, it has its storms, it has its tides and in its depths it has its pearls too

Everyone thinks writers must know more about the inside of the human head, but that's wrong. They know less, that's why they write. Trying to find out what everyone else takes for granted.

He then learns that in going down into the secrets of his own mind, he has descended into the secrets of all minds.

Anything an artist does is to show ourselves as we really are, which is a complex thing. I don't think that one work of Philosophy or Art, or Letters, or Acting, or Middle Playing, or Tightrope Walking, or Flea Circuses has made mankind better, if by better you mean kinder, wiser, more tolerant of each other. One thing self knowledge. Knoticayton: know thyself.

The globe has been circumnavigated, but no man ever yet has; you may survey a kingdom and note the result in maps, but all the savants in the world could not produce a reliable map of the poorest human personality.

Nobody looks like what they really are on the inside. You don’t. I don’t. People are much more complicated than that. It’s true of everybody.

How can a man know himself? He is a thing dark and veiled; and if the hare has seven skins, man can slough off seventy times seven and still not be able to say: "this is really you, this is no longer outer shell.

Her eyes are homes of silent prayers.