Victor Hugo Quotes

First problem. To produce wealth. Second problem. To distribute it.

A fall from such a height is rarely straight downwards.

Do not let it be your aim to be something, but to be someone.

Everything bows to success, even grammar.

I think, therefore I doubt.

There are, as we know, powerful and illustrious atheists. At bottom, led back to the truth by their very force, they are not absolutely sure that they are atheists; it is with them only a question of definition, and in any case, if they do not believe in God, being great minds, they prove God.

If it were (Is it not) outrageous that society should treat with such rigid precision those of its members who were most poorly endowed in the distribution or wealth that chance had made, and who were, therefore, most worthy of indulgence.

She had had sweet dreams, which possibly arose from the fact that her little bed was very white.

Civilization survives on the constant discovery of amity and an equal supply of damnation.

As we have explained, in first love the soul is taken long before the body; later the body is taken long before the soul; sometimes the soul is not taken at all.

Dear God! how beauty varies in nature and art.

Not seeing people permits us to imagine them with every perfection.

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.

Many great actions are committed in small struggles.

Forget not, never forget that you have promised me to use this silver to become an honest man.... Jean Valjean, my brother: you belong no longer to evil, but to good. It is your soul that I am buying for you. I withdraw it from dark thoughts and from the spirit of perdition, and I give it to God!

Loving is almost a substitute for thinking. Love is a burning forgetfulness of all other things. How shall we ask passion to be logical?

The cruel of heart have their own black happiness.

Because one doesn't like the way things are is no reason to be unjust towards God.

Human intelligence discovered a way of perpetuating itself, one not only more durable and more resistant than architecture, but also simpler and easier. Architecture was dethroned. The stone letters of Orpheus gave way to the lead letters of Gutenburg. The book will kill the edifice.

If you are stone, be magnetic; if a plant, be sensitive; but if you are human be love.

If nobody loved, the sun would go out.

We are reassured almost as foolishly as we are alarmed; human nature is so constituted.

In joined hands there is still some token of hope, in the clenched fist none.

It is often necessary to know how to obey a woman in order sometimes to have the right to command her.

Gutenberg's invention of printing is the greatest event-the mother of revolution

Change your opinions, keep to your principles; change your leaves, keep intact your roots.

A wedding is not house-keeping.

His judgement demonstrates that one can be a genius and understand nothing of an art that is not one's own.

The need of the immaterial is the most deeply rooted of all needs. One must have bread; but before bread, one must have the ideal.

Ah," cried Gavroche, "what does this mean? It rains again! ...If this continues, I withdraw my subscription.

When two souls have finally found each other, there is established between them a union which begins on earth and continues forever in heaven.

Work, which makes a man free, and thought, which makes him worthy of freedom.

Revolutions are not born of chance but of necessity.

Gavroche had fallen only to rise again; he sat up, a long stream of blood rolled down his face, he raised both arms in air, looked in the direction whence the shot came, and began to sing.

Love has no middle term; either it destroys, or it saves. All human destiny is this dilemma. This dilemma, destruction or salvation, no fate proposes more inexorably than love. Love is life, if it is not death. Cradle; coffin, too. The same sentiment says yes and no in the human heart. Of all the things God has made, the human heart is the one that sheds most light, and alas! most night.

The learned man knows that he is ignorant.

If suffer we must, let's suffer on the heights.

The supreme happiness of life is the conviction that we are loved.

A translation in verse . . . seems to me something absurd, impossible.

Friend is sometimes a word devoid of meaning; enemy, never.

You would have imagined her at one moment a maniac, at another a queen.

Emergencies have always been necessary to progress. It was darkness which produced the lamp. It was fog that produced the compass. It was hunger that drove us to exploration. And it took a depression to teach us the real value of a job.

A poet is a world enclosed in a man.

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.

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.

Nothing is more dangerous than discontinued labor; it is habit lost. A habit easy to abandon, difficult to resume.

The spirit of God, like the sun, always gives all its light at once. The spirit of man resembles the pale moon, which has its phases, its absences and its returns, its lucidity and its spots, its fullness and its disappearance, which borrows all its light from the rays of the sun, and which still dares to intercept them on occasion.

I write with one hand, but I fight with both.