Victor Hugo Quotes

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

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

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

» He who opens a school door, closes a prison.

» Laughter is the sun that drives winter from the human face.

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

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

» 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.

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

» 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.

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

» When dictatorship is a fact, revolution becomes a right.

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

» Liberation is not deliverance.

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

» 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.

» Strong and bitter words indicate a weak cause.

» When a man is out of sight, it is not too long before he is out of mind.

» Whenever a man's friends begin to compliment him about looking young, he may be sure that they think he is growing old.

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

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

» The greatest happiness of life is the conviction that we are loved; loved for ourselves, or rather, loved in spite of ourselves.

» An intelligent hell would be better than a stupid paradise.

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

» There is nothing like a dream to create the future.

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

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

» 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.

» Everything being a constant carnival, there is no carnival left.

» Fashions have done more harm than revolutions.

» Habit is the nursery of errors.

» I don't mind what Congress does, as long as they don't do it in the streets and frighten the horses.

» To love beauty is to see light.

» To think of shadows is a serious thing.

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

» Wisdom is a sacred communion.

» As the purse is emptied, the heart is filled.

» To learn to read is to light a fire; every syllable that is spelled out is a spark.

» Toleration is the best religion.

» All the forces in the world are not so powerful as an idea whose time has come.

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

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

» Joy's smile is much closer to tears than laughter.

» The mountains, the forest, and the sea, render men savage; they develop the fierce, but yet do not destroy the human.

» 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.

» Initiative is doing the right thing without being told.

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

» Adversity makes men, and prosperity makes monsters.

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

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

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

» 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.

» Curiosity is one of the forms of feminine bravery.

» Genius is a promontory jutting out into the infinite.

» 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.

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

» 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.

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

» The supreme happiness of life is the conviction that we are loved; loved for ourselves, or rather in spite of ourselves.

» To love another person is to see the face of God.

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

» 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.

» 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.

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

» Society is a republic. When an individual tries to lift themselves above others, they are dragged down by the mass, either by ridicule or slander.

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

» 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.

» The first symptom of love in a young man is timidity; in a girl boldness.

» 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.

» Life is the flower for which love is the honey.

» A library implies an act of faith.

» Civil war? What does that mean? Is there any foreign war? Isn't every war fought between men, between brothers?

» A compliment is something like a kiss through a veil.

» 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.

» My tastes are aristocratic, my actions democratic.

» Peace is the virtue of civilization. War is its crime.

» People do not lack strength; they lack will.

» It is nothing to die. It is frightful not to live.

» It is by suffering that human beings become angels.

» A compliment is like a kiss through a veil.

» Those who live are those who fight.

» Puns are the droppings of soaring wits.

» I'm religiously opposed to religion.

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

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

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

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

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

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

» Music expresses that which cannot be put into words and cannot remain silent.

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

» What is history? An echo of the past in the future; a reflex from the future on the past.

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

» The first symptom of love in a young man is shyness; the first symptom in a woman, it's boldness.

» Love is a portion of the soul itself, and it is of the same nature as the celestial breathing of the atmosphere of paradise.

» 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.

» 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.

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

» A war between Europeans is a civil war.

» Evil. Mistrust those who rejoice at it even more than those who do it.

» It is most pleasant to commit a just action which is disagreeable to someone whom one does not like.

» Freedom in art, freedom in society, this is the double goal towards which all consistent and logical minds must strive.

» A great artist is a great man in a great child.

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

» No one can keep a secret better than a child.

» Men like me are impossible until the day when they become necessary.

» To be perfectly happy it does not suffice to possess happiness, it is necessary to have deserved it.

» It is the end. But of what? The end of France? No. The end of kings? Yes.

» By putting forward the hands of the clock you shall not advance the hour.

» The animal is ignorant of the fact that he knows. The man is aware of the fact that he is ignorant.

» Doing nothing is happiness for children and misery for old men.

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

» What would be ugly in a garden constitutes beauty in a mountain.

» To love is to act.

» Despotism is a long crime.

» Blessed be Providence which has given to each his toy: the doll to the child, the child to the woman, the woman to the man, the man to the devil!

» I put a Phrygian cap on the old dictionary.

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

» Genius: the superhuman in man.

» The man who does not know other languages, unless he is a man of genius, necessarily has deficiencies in his ideas.

» The ideal and the beautiful are identical; the ideal corresponds to the idea, and beauty to form; hence idea and substance are cognate.

» As a means of contrast with the sublime, the grotesque is, in our view, the richest source that nature can offer.

» I love all men who think, even those who think otherwise than myself.

» When liberty returns, I will return.

» The word is the Verb, and the Verb is God.

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

» The wise man does not grow old, but ripens.

» To contemplate is to look at shadows.

» It is often necessary to know how to obey a woman in order sometimes to have the right to command her.

» Intelligence is the wife, imagination is the mistress, memory is the servant.

» Virtue has a veil, vice a mask.

» Prayer is an august avowal of ignorance.

» Do not let it be your aim to be something, but to be someone.

» Conscience is God present in man.

» Reaction - a boat which is going against the current but which does not prevent the river from flowing on.

» Men become accustomed to poison by degrees.

» Well, for us, in history where goodness is a rare pearl, he who was good almost takes precedence over he who was great.

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

» Perseverance, secret of all triumphs.

» The learned man knows that he is ignorant.

» 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!

» The ox suffers, the cart complains.

» One sees qualities at a distance and defects at close range.

» Style is the substance of the subject called unceasingly to the surface.

» Taste is the common sense of genius.

» The flesh is the surface of the unknown.

» 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.

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

» The last resort of kings, the cannonball. The last resort of the people, the paving stone.

» Stupidity talks, vanity acts.

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

» Idleness is the heaviest of all oppressions.

» Because one doesn't like the way things are is no reason to be unjust towards God.

» The ode lives upon the ideal, the epic upon the grandiose, the drama upon the real.

» 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.

» He who is not capable of enduring poverty is not capable of being free.

» The soul has illusions as the bird has wings: it is supported by them.

» 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.

» An invasion of armies can be resisted, but not the invasion of ideas.

» 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.

» Strange to say, the luminous world is the invisible world; the luminous world is that which we do not see. Our eyes of flesh see only night.

» Pain is as diverse as man. One suffers as one can.

» 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.

» When God desires to destroy a thing, he entrusts its destruction to the thing itself. Every bad institution of this world ends by suicide.

» Our life dreams the Utopia. Our death achieves the Ideal.

» Many great actions are committed in small struggles.

» Nature has made a pebble and a female. The lapidary makes the diamond, and the lover makes the woman.

» One believes others will do what he will do to himself.

» Scepticism, that dry caries of the intelligence.

» The wicked envy and hate; it is their way of admiring.

» To think is of itself to be useful; it is always and in all cases a striving toward God.

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

» The beautiful has but one type, the ugly has a thousand.

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

» The omnipotence of evil has never resulted in anything but fruitless efforts. Our thoughts always escape from whoever tries to smother them.

» Religions do a useful thing: they narrow God to the limits of man. Philosophy replies by doing a necessary thing: it elevates man to the plane of God.

» The little people must be sacred to the big ones, and it is from the rights of the weak that the duty of the strong is comprised.

» To rise from error to truth is rare and beautiful.

» 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.

» Without vanity, without coquetry, without curiosity, in a word, without the fall, woman would not be woman. Much of her grace is in her frailty.

» Amnesty is as good for those who give it as for those who receive it. It has the admirable quality of bestowing mercy on both sides.

» The three great problems of this century; the degradation of man in the proletariat, the subjection of women through hunger, the atrophy of the child by darkness.

» 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.'

» 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.

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

» We say that slavery has vanished from European civilization, but this is not true. Slavery still exists, but now it applies only to women and its name is prostitution.

Who Said It?

Who Said: "The video forum for me has been a source of great consternation because once you start projecting a look to a song, it robs the listener of their ability to adopt that song and make the lyric their own." Click To See

Daily Famous Quote

"The accent of one's birthplace remains in the mind and in the heart as in one's speech." - Francois de La Rochefoucauld

Victor Hugo Quotes

Who Said It?

Daily Famous Quote

Quotes by Author

Quotes by Topic