Quotes about Ethics
To commit the least possible sin is the law for man. To live without sin is the dream of an angel. Everything terrestrial is subject to sin. Sin is a gravitation.
- Victor Hugo
When a man does wrong, he should do all the wrong he can; it is madness to stop half-way in crime!
- Victor Hugo
The soul in the darkness sins, but the real sinner is he who caused the darkness.
- Victor Hugo
Javert, though hideous, was not ignoble.
- Victor Hugo
any one who had listened to Courfeyrac in 1828 would have thought he heard Tholomyes in 1817. Only, Courfeyrac was an honourable fellow. Beneath the apparent similarities of the exterior mind, the difference between him and Tholomyes was very great. The latent man which existed in the two was totally different in the first from what it was in the second. There was in Tholomyes a district attorney, and in Courfeyrac a paladin.
- Victor Hugo
Il y a des gens qui paieraient pour se vendre
- Victor Hugo
Succeed; that is the advice that falls, drop by drop, from the overhanging fruit of corruption.
- Victor Hugo
The judge speaks in the name of justice,' he said. 'The priest speaks in the name of pity, which is only a higher form of justice.' (Bishop Myriel)
- Victor Hugo
There are no bad plants or bad men. There is only bad husbandry.
- Victor Hugo
In days gone by, I stole a loaf of bread in order to live; to-day, in order to live, I will not steal a name.
- Victor Hugo
The prosperity of right is that it is always beautiful and pure.
- Victor Hugo
Was there a voice that whispered in his ear that he had just passed the most solemn moment of his destiny, that there was no longer a middle course for him; that from now on, he would either be the best of men or he would be the worst of men; that he now had to rise higher, so to speak, than the bishop or fall even lower than the galley slave; that if he wanted to be good, he had to be an angel; that if he wanted to stay bad, he had to be a monster from hell?
- Victor Hugo