QuotesTemple
Architecture has recorded the great ideas of the human race. Not only every religious symbol, but every human thought has its page in that vast book.
Victor Hugo
Each man should frame life so that at some future hour fact and his dreaming meet.
Victor Hugo
Music expresses that which cannot be said and on which it is impossible to be silent.
Victor Hugo
He who opens a school door, closes a prison.
Victor Hugo
Adversity makes men, and prosperity makes monsters.
Victor Hugo
Change your opinions, keep to your principles; change your leaves, keep intact your roots.
Victor Hugo
Concision in style, precision in thought, decision in life.
Victor Hugo
Laughter is the sun that drives winter from the human face.
Victor Hugo
The wicked envy and hate; it is their way of admiring.
Victor Hugo
An intelligent hell would be better than a stupid paradise.
Victor Hugo
Virtue has a veil, vice a mask.
Victor Hugo
All the forces in the world are not so powerful as an idea whose time has come.
Victor Hugo
Have courage for the great sorrows of life and patience for the small ones; and when you have laboriously accomplished your daily task, go to sleep in peace.
Victor Hugo
The ode lives upon the ideal, the epic upon the grandiose, the drama upon the real.
Victor Hugo
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.
Victor Hugo
Death has its revelations: the great sorrows which open the heart open the mind as well; light comes to us with our grief. As for me, I have faith; I believe in a future life. How could I do otherwise? My daughter was a soul; I saw this soul. I touched it, so to speak.
Victor Hugo
One can resist the invasion of an army but one cannot resist the invasion of ideas.
Victor Hugo
To give thanks in solitude is enough. Thanksgiving has wings and goes where it must go. Your prayer knows much more about it than you do.
Victor Hugo
Sorrow is a fruit. God does not make it grow on limbs too weak to bear it.
Victor Hugo
The wise man does not grow old, but ripens.
Victor Hugo
The mountains, the forest, and the sea, render men savage; they develop the fierce, but yet do not destroy the human.
Victor Hugo
Life is the flower for which love is the honey.
Victor Hugo
The greatest happiness of life is the conviction that we are loved; loved for ourselves, or rather, loved in spite of ourselves.
Victor Hugo
When dictatorship is a fact, revolution becomes a right.
Victor Hugo
Perseverance, secret of all triumphs.
Victor Hugo
What is history? An echo of the past in the future; a reflex from the future on the past.
Victor Hugo
There is nothing like a dream to create the future.
Victor Hugo
When God desires to destroy a thing, he entrusts its destruction to the thing itself. Every bad institution of this world ends by suicide.
Victor Hugo
Love is a portion of the soul itself, and it is of the same nature as the celestial breathing of the atmosphere of paradise.
Victor Hugo
A compliment is something like a kiss through a veil.
Victor Hugo
Short as life is, we make it still shorter by the careless waste of time.
Victor Hugo
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.
Victor Hugo
Life's greatest happiness is to be convinced we are loved.
Victor Hugo
When grace is joined with wrinkles, it is adorable. There is an unspeakable dawn in happy old age.
Victor Hugo
An invasion of armies can be resisted, but not an idea whose time has come.
Victor Hugo
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.
Victor Hugo
One is not idle because one is absorbed. There is both visible and invisible labor. To contemplate is to toil, to think is to do. The crossed arms work, the clasped hands act. The eyes upturned to Heaven are an act of creation.
Victor Hugo
Taste is the common sense of genius.
Victor Hugo
To think of shadows is a serious thing.
Victor Hugo
Forty is the old age of youth; fifty the youth of old age.
Victor Hugo
To love beauty is to see light.
Victor Hugo
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.
Victor Hugo
When a woman is talking to you, listen to what she says with her eyes.
Victor Hugo
A mother's arms are made of tenderness and children sleep soundly in them.
Victor Hugo
Initiative is doing the right thing without being told.
Victor Hugo
There is one thing stronger than all the armies in the world, and that is an idea whose time as come.
Victor Hugo
Son, brother, father, lover, friend. There is room in the heart for all the affections, as there is room in heaven for all the stars.
Victor Hugo
Peace is the virtue of civilization. War is its crime.
Victor Hugo
To love another person is to see the face of God.
Victor Hugo
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.
Victor Hugo
People do not lack strength; they lack will.
Victor Hugo
To learn to read is to light a fire; every syllable that is spelled out is a spark.
Victor Hugo
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.
Victor Hugo
Hope is the word which God has written on the brow of every man.
Victor Hugo
Nothing else in the world... not all the armies... is so powerful as an idea whose time has come.
Victor Hugo
Dear God! how beauty varies in nature and art. In a woman the flesh must be like marble; in a statue the marble must be like flesh.
Victor Hugo
Mankind is not a circle with a single center but an ellipse with two focal points of which facts are one and ideas the other.
Victor Hugo
Those who live are those who fight.
Victor Hugo
A library implies an act of faith.
Victor Hugo
Freedom in art, freedom in society, this is the double goal towards which all consistent and logical minds must strive.
Victor Hugo
The soul has illusions as the bird has wings: it is supported by them.
Victor Hugo
The supreme happiness of life is the conviction that we are loved; loved for ourselves, or rather in spite of ourselves.
Victor Hugo
The brutalities of progress are called revolutions. When they are over we realize this: that the human race has been roughly handled, but that it has advanced.
Victor Hugo
I'm religiously opposed to religion.
Victor Hugo
My tastes are aristocratic, my actions democratic.
Victor Hugo
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!
Victor Hugo
Wisdom is a sacred communion.
Victor Hugo
Genius is a promontory jutting out into the infinite.
Victor Hugo
Prayer is an august avowal of ignorance.
Victor Hugo
Try as you will, you cannot annihilate that eternal relic of the human heart, love.
Victor Hugo
I love all men who think, even those who think otherwise than myself.
Victor Hugo
The drama is complete poetry. The ode and the epic contain it only in germ; it contains both of them in a state of high development, and epitomizes both.
Victor Hugo
Doing nothing is happiness for children and misery for old men.
Victor Hugo
The flesh is the surface of the unknown.
Victor Hugo
What Shakespeare was able to do in English he would certainly not have done in French.
Victor Hugo
The ideal and the beautiful are identical; the ideal corresponds to the idea, and beauty to form; hence idea and substance are cognate.
Victor Hugo
Scepticism, that dry caries of the intelligence.
Victor Hugo
To think is of itself to be useful; it is always and in all cases a striving toward God.
Victor Hugo
Pain is as diverse as man. One suffers as one can.
Victor Hugo
Nature has made a pebble and a female. The lapidary makes the diamond, and the lover makes the woman.
Victor Hugo
One sees qualities at a distance and defects at close range.
Victor Hugo
I put a Phrygian cap on the old dictionary.
Victor Hugo
Do not let it be your aim to be something, but to be someone.
Victor Hugo
It is often necessary to know how to obey a woman in order sometimes to have the right to command her.
Victor Hugo
Civil war? What does that mean? Is there any foreign war? Isn't every war fought between men, between brothers?
Victor Hugo
To contemplate is to look at shadows.
Victor Hugo
The learned man knows that he is ignorant.
Victor Hugo
There are no rules, no models; rather, there are no rules other than the general laws of Nature.
Victor Hugo
Architecture has recorded the great ideas of the human race. Not only every religious symbol, but every human thought has its page in that vast book.
Victor Hugo
Smallness in a great man seems smaller by its disproportion with all the rest.
Victor Hugo
Reaction - a boat which is going against the current but which does not prevent the river from flowing on.
Victor Hugo
No one knows like a woman how to say things which are at once gentle and deep.
Victor Hugo
One sometimes says: 'He killed himself because he was bored with life.' One ought rather to say: 'He killed himself because he was bored by lack of life.'
Victor Hugo
Rhyme, that enslaved queen, that supreme charm of our poetry, that creator of our meter.
Victor Hugo
There have been in this century only one great man and one great thing: Napoleon and liberty. For want of the great man, let us have the great thing.
Victor Hugo
Verse in itself does not constitute poetry. Verse is only an elegant vestment for a beautiful form. Poetry can express itself in prose, but it does so more perfectly under the grace and majesty of verse. It is poetry of soul that inspires noble sentiments and noble actions as well as noble writings.
Victor Hugo
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.
Victor Hugo
To be perfectly happy it does not suffice to possess happiness, it is necessary to have deserved it.
Victor Hugo
The omnipotence of evil has never resulted in anything but fruitless efforts. Our thoughts always escape from whoever tries to smother them.
Victor Hugo
It is most pleasant to commit a just action which is disagreeable to someone whom one does not like.
Victor Hugo
Love is jealous, and ingenious in self-torture in proportion as it is pure and intense.
Victor Hugo
A poet who is a bad man is a degraded being, baser and more culpable than a bad man who is not a poet.
Victor Hugo
Conscience is God present in man.
Victor Hugo
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.
Victor Hugo
Fashions have done more harm than revolutions.
Victor Hugo
Never laugh at those who suffer; suffer sometimes those who laugh.
Victor Hugo
Almost all our desires, when examined, contain something too shameful to reveal.
Victor Hugo
The beautiful has but one type, the ugly has a thousand.
Victor Hugo
A noble soul and real poetic talent are almost always inseparable.
Victor Hugo
When a man understands the art of seeing, he can trace the spirit of an age and the features of a king even in the knocker on a door.
Victor Hugo
Despotism is a long crime.
Victor Hugo
Evil. Mistrust those who rejoice at it even more than those who do it.
Victor Hugo
Genius: the superhuman in man.
Victor Hugo
Love that is not jealous is neither true nor pure.
Victor Hugo
I would have liked to be - indeed, I should have been - a second Rembrandt.
Victor Hugo
No one ever keeps a secret so well as a child.
Victor Hugo
Because one doesn't like the way things are is no reason to be unjust towards God.
Victor Hugo
The animal is ignorant of the fact that he knows. The man is aware of the fact that he is ignorant.
Victor Hugo
But when ill indeed, Even dismissing the doctor don't always succeed.
Victor Hugo
Close by the Rights of Man, at the least set beside them, are the Rights of the Spirit.
Victor Hugo
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.
Victor Hugo
My childhood began, as everybody's childhood begins, with prejudices. Man finds prejudices beside his cradle, puts them from him a little in the course of his career, and often, alas! takes to them again in his old age.
Victor Hugo