Victor Hugo Quotes

Reason is intelligence taking exercise. Imagination is intelligence with an erection.

Certain thoughts are prayers. There are moments when, whatever be the attitude of the body, the soul is on its knees.

Teach the ignorant as much as you can; society is culpable in not providing a free education for all and it must answer for the night which it produces. If the soul is left in darkness sins will be committed. The guilty one is not he who commits the sin, but he who causes the darkness.

He who opens a school door, closes a prison.

People do not lack strength; they lack will.

Life's greatest happiness is to be convinced we are loved.

No army can withstand the strength of an idea whose time has come.

A man is not idle because he is absorbed in thought. There is a visible labor and there is an invisible labor.

An intelligent hell would be better than a stupid paradise.

The future has several names. For the weak, it is impossible; for the fainthearted, it is unknown; but for the valiant, it is ideal.

There is nothing like a dream to create the future.

When love has fused and mingled two beings in a sacred and angelic unity, the secret of life has been discovered so far as they are concerned; they are no longer anything more than the two boundaries of the same destiny; they are no longer anything but the two wings of the same spirit. Love, soar.

Melancholy is the pleasure of being sad.

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

Winter is on my head, but eternal spring is in my heart.

What a grand thing, to be loved! What a grander thing still, to love!

England has two books, the Bible and Shakespeare. England made Shakespeare,but the Bible made England.

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.

The poor man shuddered, overflowed with an angelic joy; he declared in his transport that this would last through life; he said to himself that he really had not suffered enough to deserve such radiant happiness, and he thanked God, in the depths of his soul, for having permitted that he, a miserable man, should be so loved by this innocent being.

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.

Nothing discernible to the eye of the spirit is more brilliant or obscure than man; nothing is more formidable, complex, mysterious, and infinite. There is a prospect greater than the sea, and it is the sky; there is a prospect greater than the sky, and it is the human soul.

Let us fear ourselves. Prejudices are the real robbers; vices are the real murderers. The great dangers lie within ourselves.

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.

Common sense is in spite of, not as the result of education.

Fashions have done more harm than revolutions.

Each man should frame life so that at some future hour fact and his dreaming meet.

Nothing else in the world... not all the armies... is so powerful as an idea whose time has come.

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.

It is from books that wise people derive consolation in the troubles of life.

Life is the flower for which love is the honey.

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

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.

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

Woe, alas, to those who have loved only bodies, forms, appearances! Death will rob them of everything. Try to love souls, you will find them again.

True or false, that which is set of men often occupies as important a place in their lives, and above all in their destinies, as that which they do.

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.

I think, therefore I doubt.

Yes, the brutalities of progress are called revolutions. When they are over, this is recognised: that the human race has been harshly treated, but that it has advanced.

When a woman is talking to you, listen to what she says with her eyes.

It is not enough to be happy, one must be content.

The future has many names: For the weak, it means the unattainable. For the fearful, it means the unknown. For the courageous, it means opportunity.

To love beauty is to see light.

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.

If a writer wrote merely for his time, I would have to break my pen and throw it away.

There are thoughts which are prayers. There are moments when, whatever the posture of the body, the soul is on its knees.

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

In vain we chisel, as best we can, the mysterious block of which our life is made, the black vein of destiny reappears continually

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

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.

There are people who observe the rules of honor as one observes the stars, from a great distance.

where the telescope ends the microscope begins, and who can say which has the wider vision?

Sorrow is a fruit. God does not make it grow on limbs too weak to bear it.

There is one thing stronger than all the armies in the world, and that is an idea whose time as come.

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

Curiosity is one of the forms of feminine bravery.

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

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

Jesus wept; Voltaire smiled. From that divine tear and from that human smile is derived the grace of present civilization.

There is nothing like dream to create the future. Utopia to-day, flesh and blood tomorrow.

Anger may be foolish and absurd, and one may be wrongly irritated, but a man never feels outraged unless in some respect he is fundamentally right.

A faith is a necessity to a man. Woe to him who believes in nothing.

As the purse is emptied, the heart is filled.

A library implies an act of faith.

The reduction of the universe to a single being, the expansion of a single being even to God, this is love.

Popularity? It's glory's small change.

A compliment is something like a kiss through a veil.

Caution is the eldest child of wisdom

Indigestion is charged by God with enforcing morality on the stomach.

There are fathers who do not love their children; there is no grandfather who does not adore his grandson.

When grace is joined with wrinkles, it is adorable. There is an unspeakable dawn in happy old age.

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, the light of the sun, the sighing of the wind, and the gleam of the stars -all the beauties of creation.

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.

An invasion of armies can be resisted, but not an idea whose time has come.

From the oyster to the eagle, from the swine to the tiger, all animals are to be found in men and each of them exists in some man, sometimes several at the time. Animals are nothing but the portrayal of our virtues and vices made manifest to our eyes, the visible reflections of our souls. God displays them to us to give us food for thought.

Close by the Rights of Man, at the least set beside them, are the Rights of the Spirit.

Thought is the labor of the intellect, reverie is its pleasure.

A little girl without a doll is almost as unfortunate and quite as impossible as a woman without children

Hope is the word which God has written on the brow of every man.

Strong and bitter words indicate a weak cause.

Toleration is the best religion.

The most powerful symptom of love is a tenderness which becomes at times almost insupportable.

I'd rather be hissed at for a good verse, than applauded for a bad one.

Our acts make or mar us, we are the children of our own deeds.

My tastes are aristocratic, my actions democratic.

A creditor is worse than a slave-owner; for the master owns only your person, but a creditor owns your dignity, and can command it.

Adversity makes men, and prosperity makes monsters.

Everything bows to success, even grammar.

Genius is a promontory jutting out into the infinite.

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

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

I'm religiously opposed to religion.

Loving is half of believing.

Nothing awakens reminiscence like an aroma.

Slaves would be tyrants were the chance theirs.

The book which the reader now holds in his hands, from one end to the other, as a whole and in its details, whatever gaps, exceptions, or weaknesses it may contain, treats of the advance from evil to good, from injustice to justice, from falsity to truth, from darkness to daylight, from blind appetite to conscience, from decay to life, from bestiality to duty, from Hell to Heaven, from limbo to God. Matter itself is the starting-point, and the point of arrival is the soul. Hydra at the beginning, an angel at the end.

To think of shadows is a serious thing.

No one ever keeps a secret so well as a child.

Greater than the tread of mighty armies is an idea whose time has come.

How did it happen that their lips came together? How does it happen that birds sing, that snow melts, that the rose unfolds, that the dawn whitens behind the stark shapes of trees on the quivering summit of the hill? A kiss, and all was said.

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.

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.

God created the flirt as soon as he made the fool.

Great perils have this beauty, that they bring to light the fraternity of strangers.

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