Victor Hugo Paris Quotations

If a man has his throat cut in Paris, it's a murder. If 50,000 people are murdered in the east, it is a question.

The Parisian is to the French what the Athenian was to the Greeks: no one sleeps better than he, no one is more openly frivolous and idle, no one appears more heedless. But this is misleading. He is given to every kind of listlessness, but when there is glory to be won he may be inspired with every kind of fury. Give him a pike and he will enact the tenth of August, a musket and you have Austerlitz. He was the springboard of Napoleon and the mainstay of Danton. At the cry of "la patrie" he enrols, and at the call of liberty he tears up the pavements. Beware of him!

To breathe Paris is to preserve one's soul.

To rove about, musing, that is to say loitering, is, for a philosopher, a good way of spending time, especially in that kind of mock rurality, ugly but odd, and partaking of two natures, which surrounds certain large cities, particularly Paris.

To err is human. To loaf is Parisian.

A breath of Paris preserves the soul.

He who contemplates the depths of Paris is seized with vertigo. Nothing is more fantastic. Nothing is more tragic. Nothing is more sublime.

To study in Paris is to be born in Paris!