Famous Quotes By Victor Hugo

Famous Quotes By Victor Hugo

1. A compliment is something like a kiss through a veil.
2. A faith is a necessity to a man. Woe to him who believes in nothing.
3. A great artist is a great man in a great child.
4. A library implies an act of faith.
5. A mother's arms are made of tenderness and children sleep soundly in them.
6. A war between Europeans is a civil war.
7. Adversity makes men, and prosperity makes monsters.
8. All the forces in the world are not so powerful as an idea whose time has come.
9. 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.
10. An invasion of armies can be resisted, but not an idea whose time has come.
11. 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.
12. As a means of contrast with the sublime, the grotesque is, in our view, the richest source that nature can offer.
13. Because one doesn't like the way things are is no reason to be unjust towards God.
14. Certain thoughts are prayers. There are moments when, whatever be the attitude of the body, the soul is on its knees.
15. Change your opinions, keep to your principles change your leaves, keep intact your roots.
16. Civil war? What does that mean? Is there any foreign war? Isn't every war fought between men, between brothers?
17. Common sense is in spite of, not as the result of education.
18. Conscience is God present in man.
19. 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.
20. Doing nothing is happiness for children and misery for old men.
21. Each man should frame life so that at some future hour fact and his dreaming meet.
22. Fashions have done more harm than revolutions.
23. Forty is the old age of youth fifty the youth of old age.
24. Freedom in art, freedom in society, this is the double goal towards which all consistent and logical minds must strive.
25. Great perils have this beauty, that they bring to light the fraternity of strangers.
26. Greater than the tread of mighty armies is an idea whose time has come.
27. 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.
28. He who opens a school door, closes a prison.
29. 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.
30. Hope is the word which God has written on the brow of every man.
31. 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!
32. I love all men who think, even those who think otherwise than myself.
33. 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.
34. I'm religiously opposed to religion.
35. Indigestion is charged by God with enforcing morality on the stomach.
36. Intelligence is the wife, imagination is the mistress, memory is the servant.
37. Jesus wept Voltaire smiled. From that divine tear and from that human smile is derived the grace of present civilization.
38. Joy's smile is much closer to tears than laughter.
39. Life is the flower for which love is the honey.
40. Life's greatest happiness is to be convinced we are loved.
41. Love is a portion of the soul itself, and it is of the same nature as the celestial breathing of the atmosphere of paradise.
42. Many great actions are committed in small struggles.
43. Men become accustomed to poison by degrees.
44. Men like me are impossible until the day when they become necessary.
45. Music expresses that which cannot be said and on which it is impossible to be silent.
46. Nature has made a pebble and a female. The lapidary makes the diamond, and the lover makes the woman.
47. Nothing else in the world... not all the armies... is so powerful as an idea whose time has come.
48. 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.
49. Our life dreams the Utopia. Our death achieves the Ideal.
50. Peace is the virtue of civilization. War is its crime.
51. People do not lack strength they lack will.
52. 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.
53. Rhyme, that enslaved queen, that supreme charm of our poetry, that creator of our meter.
54. Scepticism, that dry caries of the intelligence.
55. Short as life is, we make it still shorter by the careless waste of time.
56. Smallness in a great man seems smaller by its disproportion with all the rest.
57. 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.
58. Sorrow is a fruit. God does not make it grow on limbs too weak to bear it.
59. 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.
60. The first symptom of love in a young man is timidity in a girl boldness.
61. The greatest happiness of life is the conviction that we are loved loved for ourselves, or rather, loved in spite of ourselves.
62. The ideal and the beautiful are identical the ideal corresponds to the idea, and beauty to form hence idea and substance are cognate.
63. The mountains, the forest, and the sea, render men savage they develop the fierce, but yet do not destroy the human.
64. The supreme happiness of life is the conviction that we are loved loved for ourselves, or rather in spite of ourselves.
65. 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.
66. The word is the Verb, and the Verb is God.
67. There are fathers who do not love their children there is no grandfather who does not adore his grandson.
68. 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.
69. There is nothing like a dream to create the future.
70. There is one thing stronger than all the armies in the world, and that is an idea whose time as come.
71. To be perfectly happy it does not suffice to possess happiness, it is necessary to have deserved it.
72. 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.
73. To love another person is to see the face of God.
74. To love beauty is to see light.
75. To rise from error to truth is rare and beautiful.
76. To think is of itself to be useful it is always and in all cases a striving toward God.
77. Toleration is the best religion.
78. 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.
79. We see past time in a telescope and present time in a microscope. Hence the apparent enormities of the present.
80. Well, for us, in history where goodness is a rare pearl, he who was good almost takes precedence over he who was great.
81. What is history? An echo of the past in the future a reflex from the future on the past.
82. What would be ugly in a garden constitutes beauty in a mountain.
83. When God desires to destroy a thing, he entrusts its destruction to the thing itself. Every bad institution of this world ends by suicide.
84. When grace is joined with wrinkles, it is adorable. There is an unspeakable dawn in happy old age.
85. Wisdom is a sacred communion.