Victor Hugo Quotes

I'd like to see Paris before I die... Philadelphia will do.

Melancholy betrays the world for the sake of knowledge. But in its tenacious self-absorption it embraces dead objects in its contemplation, in order to redeem them

Once I knew the City very well, spent my attic days there, while others were being a lost generation in Paris, I fledged in San Francisco, climbed its hills. slept in its parks, worked on its docks, marched and shouted in its revolts~ It had been to me in the days of my poverty and it did not resent my temporary solvency.

To rove about, musing, that is to say loitering, is, for a philosopher, a good way of spending time.

In years that bring the philosophic mind.

One should turn towards the main ocean of the-beautiful-in-the-world so that one may by, contemplation of this Form, bring forth in all their splendor many fair fruits of discourse and meditation in a plenteous crop of philosophy.

Doing philosophy is only a threefold or double kind of waking--being awake--consciousness.

Philosophy, certainly, is some account of truths the fragments and very insignificant parts of which man will practice in this workshop; truths infinite and in harmony with infinity, in respect to which the very objects and ends of the so-called practical philosopher will be mere propositions, like the rest.

The practical answer is, no it would be totally impossible for young or foreign people to get access to roof of a building that stands in the heart of a giant city and to put a cable across.

When all else fails, philosophize.

I knew one person in the entire city of New York. Looking back, I should have been terrified, but I was just excited to living in New York on my own and acting professionally.

Philosophy is the rational expression of genius.

I am going to enjoy life in Paris I know. It is so human and there is something noble in the city... It is a real city, old and fine and life plays in it for everybody to see.

New York City is my playground.

I walked around Soho's street for over an hour, running into familiar faces but never once stopping to chat. It was then that I felt something discomforting and comforting all at once. I didn't want to be here, in this city, anymore.

Paris is a city of centralisation--and centralisation and classification are closely allied. In the early times, when centralisation is becoming a fact, its forerunner is classification. All things which are similar or analogous become grouped together, and from the grouping of groups rises one whole or central point. We see radiating many long arms with innumerable tentaculae, and in the centre rises a gigantic head with a comprehensive brain and keen eyes to look on every side and ears sensitive to hear--and a voracious mouth to swallow.

We're crazy about this city. First time we came here, we walked the streets all day, all over town and nobody hassled us. People smiled, friendly-like, and we knew we could live here. We'd like to keep our place in Greenwich Village and have an apartment here, God and the Immigration Service willing. Los Angeles? That's just a big parking lot where you buy a hamburger for the trip to San Francisco.

Philosophy, the love of Wisdom, is at the very bottom defence against the incomprehensible.

Ultimate questions will always lie beyond the scope of empirical science as it is.

A city always contains more than any inhabitant can know, and a great city always makes the unknown and the possible spurs to the imagination.

Budapest is a prime site for dreams: the East’s exuberant vision of the West, the West’s uneasy hallucination of the East. It is a dreamed-up city; a city almost completely faked; a city invented out of other cities, out of Paris by way of Vienna — the imitation, as Claudio Magris has it, of an imitation.

To become a philosopher, start by walking very slowly.

You're thinking about something, my dear, and that makes you forget to talk. I can't tell you just now what the moral of that is, but I shall remember it in a bit." "Perhaps it hasn't one," Alice ventured to remark. "Tut, tut, child!" said the Duchess. "Everything's got a moral, if only you can find it.

We come late, if at all, to wine and philosophy: whiskey and action are easier.

... Philosophy proper is a subject, on the one hand so hopelessly obscure, on the other so astonishingly elementary, that there knowledge hardly counts.