Victor Hugo Quotes
Victor Hugo Quotes
- 1
A compliment is something like a kiss through a veil.
Victor-HugoVictor Hugo
- 2
A faith is a necessity to a man. Woe to him who believes in nothing.
Victor-HugoVictor Hugo
- 3
A great artist is a great man in a great child.
Victor-HugoVictor Hugo
- 4
A library implies an act of faith.
Victor-HugoVictor Hugo
- 5
A man is not idle because he is absorbed in thought. There is a visible labor and there is an invisible labor.
Victor-HugoVictor Hugo
- 6
A mother's arms are made of tenderness and children sleep soundly in them.
Victor-HugoVictor Hugo
- 7
A war between Europeans is a civil war.
Victor-HugoVictor Hugo
- 8
Adversity makes men, and prosperity makes monsters.
Victor-HugoVictor Hugo
- 9
Almost all our desires, when examined, contain something too shameful to reveal.
Victor-HugoVictor Hugo
- 10
Amnesty is as good for those who give it as for those who receive it. It has the admirable quality of bestowing mercy on both sides.
Victor-HugoVictor Hugo
- 11
An intelligent hell would be better than a stupid paradise.
Victor-HugoVictor Hugo
- 12
An invasion of armies can be resisted, but not an idea whose time has come.
Victor-HugoVictor Hugo
- 13
An invasion of armies can be resisted, but not the invasion of ideas.
Victor-HugoVictor Hugo
- 14
As a means of contrast with the sublime, the grotesque is, in our view, the richest source that nature can offer.
Victor-HugoVictor Hugo
- 15
As the purse is emptied, the heart is filled.
Victor-HugoVictor Hugo
- 16
Be as a bird perched on a frail branch that she feels bending beneath her, still she sings away all the same, knowing she has wings.
Victor-HugoVictor Hugo
- 17
Be like the bird that, passing on her flight awhile on boughs too slight, feels them give way beneath her, and yet sings, knowing that she hath wings.
Victor-HugoVictor Hugo
- 18
Be like the bird that, pausing in her flight awhile on boughs too slight, feels them give way beneath her, and yet sings, knowing that she hath wings.
Victor-HugoVictor Hugo
- 19
Because one doesn't like the way things are is no reason to be unjust towards God.
Victor-HugoVictor Hugo
- 20
Blessed be Providence which has given to each his toy: the doll to the child, the child to the woman, the woman to the man, the man to the devil!
Victor-HugoVictor Hugo
- 21
But when ill indeed, Even dismissing the doctor don't always succeed.
Victor-Hugo/">Victor Hugo
- 22
By putting forward the hands of the clock you shall not advance the hour.
Victor-Hugo/">Victor Hugo
- 23
Certain thoughts are prayers. There are moments when, whatever be the attitude of the body, the soul is on its knees.
Victor-Hugo/">Victor Hugo
- 24
Change your opinions, keep to your principles; change your leaves, keep intact your roots.
Victor-Hugo/">Victor Hugo
- 25
Close by the Rights of Man, at the least set beside them, are the Rights of the Spirit.
Victor-Hugo/">Victor Hugo
- 26
Common sense is in spite of, not as the result of education.
Victor-Hugo/">Victor Hugo
- 27
Curiosity is one of the forms of feminine bravery.
Victor-Hugo/">Victor Hugo
- 28
Dear God! how beauty varies in nature and art. In a woman the flesh must be like marble; in a statue the marble must be like flesh.
Victor-Hugo/">Victor Hugo
- 29
Despotism is a long crime.
Victor-Hugo/">Victor Hugo
- 30
Do not let it be your aim to be something, but to be someone.
Victor-Hugo/">Victor Hugo
- 31
Doing nothing is happiness for children and misery for old men.
Victor-Hugo/">Victor Hugo
- 32
Each man should frame life so that at some future hour fact and his dreaming meet.
Victor-Hugo/">Victor Hugo
- 33
Evil. Mistrust those who rejoice at it even more than those who do it.
Victor-Hugo/">Victor Hugo
- 34
Fashions have done more harm than revolutions.
Victor-Hugo/">Victor Hugo
- 35
Forty is the old age of youth; fifty the youth of old age.
Victor-Hugo/">Victor Hugo
- 36
Genius is a promontory jutting out into the infinite.
Victor-Hugo/">Victor Hugo
- 37
Genius: the superhuman in man.
Victor-Hugo/">Victor Hugo
- 38
Habit is the nursery of errors.
Victor-Hugo/">Victor Hugo
- 39
Have courage for the great sorrows of life and patience for the small ones; and when you have laboriously accomplished your daily task, go to sleep in peace.
Victor-Hugo/">Victor Hugo
- 40
He who is not capable of enduring poverty is not capable of being free.
Victor-Hugo/">Victor Hugo
- 41
He, who every morning plans the transactions of the day, and follows that plan, carries a thread that will guide him through a labyrinth of the most busy life.
Victor-Hugo/41.php">Victor Hugo
- 42
Hell is an outrage on humanity. When you tell me that your deity made you in his image, I reply that he must have been very ugly.
Victor-Hugo/42.php">Victor Hugo
- 43
I am a soul. I know well that what I shall render up to the grave is not myself. That which is myself will go elsewhere. Earth, thou art not my abyss!
Victor-Hugo/43.php">Victor Hugo
- 44
I am an intelligent river which has reflected successively all the banks before which it has flowed by meditating only on the images offered by those changing shores.
Victor-Hugo/44.php">Victor Hugo
- 45
I love all men who think, even those who think otherwise than myself.
Victor-Hugo/45.php">Victor Hugo
- 46
I met in the street a very poor young man who was in love. His hat was old, his coat worn, his cloak was out at the elbows, the water passed through his shoes, - and the stars through his soul.
Victor-Hugo/46.php">Victor Hugo
- 47
I put a Phrygian cap on the old dictionary.
Victor-Hugo/47.php">Victor Hugo
- 48
I'm religiously opposed to religion.
Victor-Hugo/48.php">Victor Hugo
- 49
Idleness is the heaviest of all oppressions.
Victor-Hugo/49.php">Victor Hugo
- 50
Indigestion is charged by God with enforcing morality on the stomach.
Victor-Hugo/50.php">Victor Hugo
- 51
Intelligence is the wife, imagination is the mistress, memory is the servant.
Victor-Hugo/51.php">Victor Hugo
- 52
It is by suffering that human beings become angels.
Victor-Hugo/52.php">Victor Hugo
- 53
It is from books that wise people derive consolation in the troubles of life.
Victor-Hugo/53.php">Victor Hugo
- 54
It is the end. But of what? The end of France? No. The end of kings? Yes.
Victor-Hugo/54.php">Victor Hugo
- 55
Jesus wept; Voltaire smiled. From that divine tear and from that human smile is derived the grace of present civilization.
Victor-Hugo/55.php">Victor Hugo
- 56
Joy's smile is much closer to tears than laughter.
Victor-Hugo/56.php">Victor Hugo
- 57
Liberation is not deliverance.
Victor-Hugo/57.php">Victor Hugo
- 58
Life's greatest happiness is to be convinced we are loved.
Victor-Hugo/58.php">Victor Hugo
- 59
Love is a portion of the soul itself, and it is of the same nature as the celestial breathing of the atmosphere of paradise.
Victor-Hugo/59.php">Victor Hugo
- 60
Many great actions are committed in small struggles.
Victor-Hugo/60.php">Victor Hugo
- 61
Men like me are impossible until the day when they become necessary.
Victor-Hugo/61.php">Victor Hugo
- 62
Music expresses that which cannot be put into words and cannot remain silent.
Victor-Hugo/62.php">Victor Hugo
- 63
Music expresses that which cannot be said and on which it is impossible to be silent.
Victor-Hugo/63.php">Victor Hugo
- 64
My tastes are aristocratic, my actions democratic.
Victor-Hugo/64.php">Victor Hugo
- 65
Nations, like stars, are entitled to eclipse. All is well, provided the light returns and the eclipse does not become endless night. Dawn and resurrection are synonymous. The reappearance of the light is the same as the survival of the soul.
Victor-Hugo/65.php">Victor Hugo
- 66
Nature has made a pebble and a female. The lapidary makes the diamond, and the lover makes the woman.
Victor-Hugo/66.php">Victor Hugo
- 67
No one can keep a secret better than a child.
Victor-Hugo/67.php">Victor Hugo
- 68
No one ever keeps a secret so well as a child.
Victor-Hugo/68.php">Victor Hugo
- 69
Nothing else in the world... not all the armies... is so powerful as an idea whose time has come.
Victor-Hugo/69.php">Victor Hugo
- 70
One believes others will do what he will do to himself.
Victor-Hugo/70.php">Victor Hugo
- 71
One can resist the invasion of an army but one cannot resist the invasion of ideas.
Victor-Hugo/71.php">Victor Hugo
- 72
One is not idle because one is absorbed. There is both visible and invisible labor. To contemplate is to toil, to think is to do. The crossed arms work, the clasped hands act. The eyes upturned to Heaven are an act of creation.
Victor-Hugo/72.php">Victor Hugo
- 73
One of the hardest tasks is to extract continually from one's soul an almost inexhaustible ill will.
Victor-Hugo/73.php">Victor Hugo
- 74
One sees qualities at a distance and defects at close range.
Victor-Hugo/74.php">Victor Hugo
- 75
One sometimes says: 'He killed himself because he was bored with life.' One ought rather to say: 'He killed himself because he was bored by lack of life.'
Victor-Hugo/75.php">Victor Hugo
- 76
Our acts make or mar us, we are the children of our own deeds.
Victor-Hugo/76.php">Victor Hugo
- 77
Our life dreams the Utopia. Our death achieves the Ideal.
Victor-Hugo/77.php">Victor Hugo
- 78
Pain is as diverse as man. One suffers as one can.
Victor-Hugo/78.php">Victor Hugo
- 79
Peace is the virtue of civilization. War is its crime.
Victor-Hugo/79.php">Victor Hugo
- 80
People do not lack strength; they lack will.
Victor-Hugo/80.php">Victor Hugo
- 81
Perseverance, secret of all triumphs.
Victor-Hugo/81.php">Victor Hugo
- 82
Prayer is an august avowal of ignorance.
Victor-Hugo/82.php">Victor Hugo
- 83
Puns are the droppings of soaring wits.
Victor-Hugo/83.php">Victor Hugo
- 84
Reaction - a boat which is going against the current but which does not prevent the river from flowing on.
Victor-Hugo/84.php">Victor Hugo
- 85
Religions do a useful thing: they narrow God to the limits of man. Philosophy replies by doing a necessary thing: it elevates man to the plane of God.
Victor-Hugo/85.php">Victor Hugo
- 86
Rhyme, that enslaved queen, that supreme charm of our poetry, that creator of our meter.
Victor-Hugo/86.php">Victor Hugo
- 87
Scepticism, that dry caries of the intelligence.
Victor-Hugo/87.php">Victor Hugo
- 88
Smallness in a great man seems smaller by its disproportion with all the rest.
Victor-Hugo/88.php">Victor Hugo
- 89
Son, brother, father, lover, friend. There is room in the heart for all the affections, as there is room in heaven for all the stars.
Victor-Hugo/89.php">Victor Hugo
- 90
Sorrow is a fruit. God does not make it grow on limbs too weak to bear it.
Victor-Hugo/90.php">Victor Hugo
- 91
Strong and bitter words indicate a weak cause.
Victor-Hugo/91.php">Victor Hugo
- 92
Stupidity talks, vanity acts.
Victor-Hugo/92.php">Victor Hugo
- 93
Style is the substance of the subject called unceasingly to the surface.
Victor-Hugo/93.php">Victor Hugo
- 94
Sublime upon sublime scarcely presents a contrast, and we need a little rest from everything, even the beautiful.
Victor-Hugo/94.php">Victor Hugo
- 95
Taste is the common sense of genius.
Victor-Hugo/95.php">Victor Hugo
- 96
The animal is ignorant of the fact that he knows. The man is aware of the fact that he is ignorant.
Victor-Hugo/96.php">Victor Hugo
- 97
The beautiful has but one type, the ugly has a thousand.
Victor-Hugo/97.php">Victor Hugo
- 98
The drama is complete poetry. The ode and the epic contain it only in germ; it contains both of them in a state of high development, and epitomizes both.
Victor-Hugo/98.php">Victor Hugo
- 99
The first symptom of love in a young man is shyness; the first symptom in a woman, it's boldness.
Victor-Hugo/99.php">Victor Hugo
- 100
The first symptom of love in a young man is timidity; in a girl boldness.
Victor-Hugo/100.php">Victor Hugo
- 101
The flesh is the surface of the unknown.
Victor-Hugo/101.php">Victor Hugo
- 102
The greatest happiness of life is the conviction that we are loved; loved for ourselves, or rather, loved in spite of ourselves.
Victor-Hugo/102.php">Victor Hugo
- 103
The human soul has still greater need of the ideal than of the real. It is by the real that we exist; it is by the ideal that we live.
Victor-Hugo/103.php">Victor Hugo
- 104
The last resort of kings, the cannonball. The last resort of the people, the paving stone.
Victor-Hugo/104.php">Victor Hugo
- 105
The learned man knows that he is ignorant.
Victor-Hugo/105.php">Victor Hugo
- 106
The little people must be sacred to the big ones, and it is from the rights of the weak that the duty of the strong is comprised.
Victor-Hugo/106.php">Victor Hugo
- 107
The man who does not know other languages, unless he is a man of genius, necessarily has deficiencies in his ideas.
Victor-Hugo/107.php">Victor Hugo
- 108
The mountains, the forest, and the sea, render men savage; they develop the fierce, but yet do not destroy the human.
Victor-Hugo/108.php">Victor Hugo
- 109
The ode lives upon the ideal, the epic upon the grandiose, the drama upon the real.
Victor-Hugo/109.php">Victor Hugo
- 110
The ox suffers, the cart complains.
Victor-Hugo/110.php">Victor Hugo
- 111
The soul has illusions as the bird has wings: it is supported by them.
Victor-Hugo/111.php">Victor Hugo
- 112
The three great problems of this century; the degradation of man in the proletariat, the subjection of women through hunger, the atrophy of the child by darkness.
Victor-Hugo/112.php">Victor Hugo
- 113
The wicked envy and hate; it is their way of admiring.
Victor-Hugo/113.php">Victor Hugo
- 114
There are fathers who do not love their children; there is no grandfather who does not adore his grandson.
Victor-Hugo/114.php">Victor Hugo
- 115
There have been in this century only one great man and one great thing: Napoleon and liberty. For want of the great man, let us have the great thing.
Victor-Hugo/115.php">Victor Hugo
- 116
There is a sacred horror about everything grand. It is easy to admire mediocrity and hills; but whatever is too lofty, a genius as well as a mountain, an assembly as well as a masterpiece, seen too near, is appalling.
Victor-Hugo/116.php">Victor Hugo
- 117
There is no such thing as a little country. The greatness of a people is no more determined by their numbers than the greatness of a man is by his height.
Victor-Hugo/117.php">Victor Hugo
- 118
There is one spectacle grander than the sea, that is the sky; there is one spectacle grander than the sky, that is the interior of the soul.
Victor-Hugo/118.php">Victor Hugo
- 119
Those who live are those who fight.
Victor-Hugo/119.php">Victor Hugo
- 120
Thought is the labor of the intellect, reverie is its pleasure.
Victor-Hugo/120.php">Victor Hugo
- 121
To be perfectly happy it does not suffice to possess happiness, it is necessary to have deserved it.
Victor-Hugo/1">Victor Hugo
- 122
To give thanks in solitude is enough. Thanksgiving has wings and goes where it must go. Your prayer knows much more about it than you do.
Victor-Hugo/1">Victor Hugo
- 123
To learn to read is to light a fire; every syllable that is spelled out is a spark.
Victor-Hugo/1">Victor Hugo
- 124
To love another person is to see the face of God.
Victor-Hugo/1">Victor Hugo
- 125
To rise from error to truth is rare and beautiful.
Victor-Hugo/1">Victor Hugo
- 126
To think is of itself to be useful; it is always and in all cases a striving toward God.
Victor-Hugo/1">Victor Hugo
- 127
To think of shadows is a serious thing.
Victor-Hugo/1">Victor Hugo
- 128
Toleration is the best religion.
Victor-Hugo/1">Victor Hugo
- 129
Try as you will, you cannot annihilate that eternal relic of the human heart, love.
Victor-Hugo/1">Victor Hugo
- 130
Virtue has a veil, vice a mask.
Victor-Hugo/1">Victor Hugo
- 131
We say that slavery has vanished from European civilization, but this is not true. Slavery still exists, but now it applies only to women and its name is prostitution.
Victor-Hugo/1">Victor Hugo
- 132
We see past time in a telescope and present time in a microscope. Hence the apparent enormities of the present.
Victor-Hugo/1">Victor Hugo
- 133
What is history? An echo of the past in the future; a reflex from the future on the past.
Victor-Hugo/1">Victor Hugo
- 134
What would be ugly in a garden constitutes beauty in a mountain.
Victor-Hugo/1">Victor Hugo
- 135
When a man is out of sight, it is not too long before he is out of mind.
Victor-Hugo/1">Victor Hugo
- 136
When God desires to destroy a thing, he entrusts its destruction to the thing itself. Every bad institution of this world ends by suicide.
Victor-Hugo/1">Victor Hugo
- 137
When grace is joined with wrinkles, it is adorable. There is an unspeakable dawn in happy old age.
Victor-Hugo/1">Victor Hugo
- 138
When liberty returns, I will return.
Victor-Hugo/1">Victor Hugo
- 139
Whenever a man's friends begin to compliment him about looking young, he may be sure that they think he is growing old.
Victor-Hugo/1">Victor Hugo
- 140
Wisdom is a sacred communion.
Victor-Hugo/1">Victor Hugo
