Victor Hugo Quotes

Since we shall love each other, I shall be great and you shall be rich.

Every day has its great grief or its small anxiety. ... One cloud is dispelled, another forms. There is hardly one day in a hundred of real joy and bright sunshine.

Marius was of the temperament that sinks into grief and remains there; Cosette was of the sort that plunges in and comes out again.

At the moment when her eyes closed, when all feeling vanished in her, she thought that she felt a touch of fire imprinted on her lips, a kiss more burning than the red-hot iron of the executioner.

Concision in style, precision in thought, decision in life.

Revery, which is thought in its nebulous state, borders closely upon the land of sleep, by which it is bounded as by a natural frontier.

Never laugh at those who suffer; suffer sometimes those who laugh.

Try as you will, you cannot annihilate that eternal relic of the human heart, love.

Right is right only when entire.

The true artist can only labor con amore.

There is in every village a torch - the teacher; and an extinguisher - the priest.

Large, heavy, ragged black clouds hung like crape hammocks beneath the starry cope of the night. You would have said that they were the cobwebs of the firmament.

Do you hear the people sing Lost in the valley of the night? It is the music of a people Who are climbing to the light. For the wretched of the earth There is a flame that never dies. Even the darkest night will end And the sun will rise.

If you want to civilize a man, begin with his grandmother.

You preserve your shame but you kill your glory.

Sire, you are looking at a plain man, and I am looking at a great man. Each of us may benefit.

Morality is truth in full bloom.

Nature is pitiless; she never withdraws her flowers, her music, her fragrance, and her sunlight from before human cruelty or suffering.

Though one believes in nothing, there are moments in life when one accepts the religion of the temple nearest at hand.

Between the government which does evil and the people who accept it - there is a certain shameful solidarity.

[T]he small is great, the great is small; all is in equilibrium in necessity.

To breathe Paris is to preserve one's soul.

I would rather be the head of a fly than the tail of a lion.

Forty is the old age of youth; fifty the youth of old age.

I like the laughter that opens the lips and the heart, shows at the same time the pearls and the soul.

One can resist the invasion of an army but one cannot resist the invasion of ideas.

We teachers make the road, others will make the journey.

Do you know what friendship is?' he asked. 'Yes,' replied the gypsy; 'it is to be brother and sister; two souls which touch without mingling, two fingers on one hand.' 'And love?' pursued Gringoire. 'Oh! love!' said she, and her voice trembled, and her eye beamed. 'That is to be two and to be but one. A man and a woman mingled into one angel. It is heaven.

They say love is blindness of heart; I say not to love is blindness.

Memory is a gulf that a word can move to its lowest depths.

There is one spectacle grander than the sea, That is the sky.

To die is nothing; but it is terrible not to live.

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!

In the domain of art there is no light without heat.

I will be Chateaubriand or nothing.

Toleration is the best religion.

God is behind everything, but everything hides God.

You say, "Where goest Thou?" I cannot tell, And still go on. But if the way be straight I cannot go amiss: before me lies Dawn and the day: the night behind me: that Suffices me: I break the bounds: I see, And nothing more; believe and nothing less. My future is not one of my concerns.

Have no fear of robbers or murderers. They are external dangers, petty dangers. We should fear ourselves. Prejudices are the real robbers; vices the real murderers. The great dangers are within us. Why worry about what threatens our heads or our purses? Let us think instead of what threatens our souls.

A thousand men enslaved fear one beast free.

I am in the night. There is a being who has gone away and carried the heavens with her. Oh! to be laid side by side in the same tomb, hand clasped in hand, and from time to time, in the darkness, to caress a finger gently, that would suffice for my eternity.

Rhyme, that enslaved queen, that supreme charm of our poetry, that creator of our meter.

God became man, granted. The devil became a woman.

He who is not master of his own thoughts is not accountable for his own deeds.

The author creates a book and the people accept or not accept it. The creator of a book is an author and the creator of it`s fate are people.

Sublime upon sublime scarcely presents a contrast, and we need a little rest from everything, even the beautiful.

We shall not attempt to give the reader an idea of that tetrahedron nose-that horse-shoe mouth-that small left eye over-shadowed by a red bushy brow, while the right eye disappeared entirely under an enormous wart-of those straggling teeth with breaches here and there like the battlements of a fortress-of that horny lip, over which one of those teeth projected like the tusk of an elephant-of that forked chin-and, above all, of the expression diffused over the whole-that mixture of malice, astonishment, and melancholy. Let the reader, if he can, figure to himself this combination.

The onward march of the human race requires that the heights around it constantly blaze with noble lessons of courage. Deeds of daring dazzle history and form one of man's guiding lights.