Victor Hugo Quotes

Was it possible that Napoleon should win the battle of Waterloo? We answer, No! Why? Because of Wellington? Because of Blucher? No! Because of God! For Bonaparte to conquer at Waterloo was not the law of the nineteenth century. It was time that this vast man should fall. He had been impeached before the Infinite! He had vexed God! Waterloo was not a battle. It was the change of front of the Universe!

The guilty one is not he who commits the sin, but he who causes the darkness.

Paris is a sum total. Paris is the ceiling of the human race. All this prodigious city is an epitome of dead and living manners and customs. He who sees Paris, seems to see all history through with the sky and constellations in the intervals.

France is great because she is France.

One of the magnanimities of woman is to yield.

Of all the things that God has made, the human heart is the one which sheds the most light, alas! and the most darkness.

There is always more misery among the lower classes than there is humanity in the higher.

A mother's arms are made of tenderness and children sleep soundly in them.

The poetic element lying hidden in most women is the source of their magnetic attraction.

Short as life is, we make it still shorter by the careless waste of time.

To see so much misery everywhere, I suspect that God is not rich. He keeps up appearances, it is true, but I feel the pinch. He gives a revolution as a merchant, whose credit is low, gives a ball.

He who opens a school door, closes a prison.

No one knows like a woman how to say things which are at once gentle and deep.

Inspiration and genius -one and the same.

Adversity makes men, and prosperity makes monsters.

Be like the bird who, pausing in her flight awhile on boughs too slight, feels them give way beneath her, and yet sings, knowing she hath wings.

Loving is half of believing.

He was fond of books, for they are cool and sure friends

As with stomachs, we should pity minds that do not eat.

Smallness in a great man seems smaller by its disproportion with all the rest.