Victor Hugo Quotes

Stupidity talks, vanity acts.

Often the losing of a battle leads to the winning of progress. Less glory but greater liberty: the drum is silent and the voices of reason can be heard.

When you get an idea into your head you find it in everything.

Proverty and wealth are comparative sins.

Need is a low door which, when we must by stern necessity pass through, forces the greatest to bend down the most.

Lastly, this threefold poetry flows from three great sources - The Bible, Homer, Shakespeare.... The Bible before the Iliad, the Iliad before Shakespeare.

Let us have compassion for those under chastisement. Alas, who are we ourselves? Who am I and who are you? Whence do we come and is it quite certain that we did nothing before we were born? This earth is not without some resemblance to a gaol. Who knows but that man is a victim of divine justice? Look closely at life. It is so constituted that one senses punishment everywhere.

Music expresses that which cannot be said and on which it is impossible to be silent.

God blesses man, not for having found but for having sought.

It is by suffering that human beings become angels.

The owl goes not into the nest of the lark.

Good actions are the invisible hinges on the doors of heaven.

One of the hardest tasks is to extract continually from one's soul an almost inexhaustible ill will.

When liberty returns, I will return.

Great grief is a divine and terrible radiance which transfigures the wretched.

Genuflection before the idol or the dollar destroys the muscles which walk and the will that moves.

Conscience is God present in man.

Dreaming is happiness. Waiting is life.

Dying is nothing. What's terrible is not to live.

There is a way of meeting error while on the road of truth.

What matters deafness of the ear, when the mind hears? The one true deafness, the incurable deafness, is that of the mind.

I'm not in the world to guard my own life, but to guard souls

God secludes Himself; but the thinker listens at the door.

Work is the law of life, and to reject it as boredom is to submit to it as torment.

And so, being in Heaven, it was easy for him to lose sight of earth.

If she gives me all her time it is because I have all her heart.

And then, strange to say, the first symptom of true love in a young man is timidity; in a girl, it is boldness.

Genius is a promontory jutting out into the infinite.

I represent a party which does not yet exist: the party Revolution-Civilization. This party will make the twentieth century. There will issue from it first the United States of Europe, then the United States of the World.

Table talk and Lovers' talk equally elude the grasp; Lovers' talk is clouds, table talk is smoke.

The heart becomes heroic through passion. It is no longer composed of anything but what is pure; it no longer rests upon anything but what is elevated and great.

So your desire is to do nothing? Well, you shall not have a week, a day, an hour, free from oppression. You shall not be able to lift anything without agony. Every passing minute will make your muscles crack. What is feather to others will be a rock to you. The simplest things will become difficult. Life will become monstrous about you. To come, to go, to breathe, will be so many terrible tasks for you. Your lungs will feel like a hundred-pound weight.

Nature, like a kind and smiling mother, lends herself to our dreams and cherishes our fancies.

But when ill indeed, Even dismissing the doctor don't always succeed.

The jostling of young minds against each other has this wonderful attribute, that one can never foresee the spark, nor predict the flash. What will spring up in a moment? Nobody knows.

Joy is the reflex of terror.

Separated lovers cheat absence by a thousand fancies which have their own reality. They are prevented from seeing one another and they cannot write; nevertheless they find countless mysterious ways of corresponding, by sending each other the song of birds, the scent of flowers, the laughter of children.

A sewer is a cynic. It tells All.

All who suffer are full of hatred; all who live drag a remorse: the dead alone have broken their chains.

The sewer is the conscience of the city.

A one-eyed man is much more incomplete than a blind man, for he knows what it is that's lacking.

Philosophy is the microscope of thought.

Why worry about what threatens our heads or purses? Let us think instead of what threatens our souls.

The power of a glance has been so much abused in love stories, that it has come to be disbelieved in. Few people dare now to say that two beings have fallen in love because they have looked at each other. Yet it is in this way that love begins, and in this way only.

Almost all our desires, when examined, contain something too shameful to reveal.

Not ill? No truly, I am young, healthful, and strong; the blood flows freely in my veins; my limbs obey my will; I am robust in mind and body, constituted for a long life. Yes, all this is true; and yet, nevertheless, I have an illness, a fatal illness,-an illness given by the hand of man!

We see past time in a telescope and present time in a microscope. Hence the apparent enormities of the present.

Diamonds are to be found only in the darkness of the earth, and truth in the darkness of the mind.