Victor Hugo Quotes
Author & Poet
The greatest happiness of life is the conviction that we are loved; loved for ourselves, or rather, loved in spite of ourselves.
Life is the flower for which love is the honey.
Forty is the old age of youth; fifty the youth of old age.
The wise man does not grow old, but ripens.
Adversity makes men, and prosperity makes monsters.
He who opens a school door, closes a prison.
A mother's arms are made of tenderness and children sleep soundly in them.
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.
Laughter is the sun that drives winter from the human face.
Music expresses that which cannot be said and on which it is impossible to be silent.
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.
Perseverance, secret of all triumphs.
An invasion of armies can be resisted, but not an idea whose time has come.
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.
What is history? An echo of the past in the future; a reflex from the future on the past.
All the forces in the world are not so powerful as an idea whose time has come.
To love beauty is to see light.
Initiative is doing the right thing without being told.
Virtue has a veil, vice a mask.
When dictatorship is a fact, revolution becomes a right.
When grace is joined with wrinkles, it is adorable. There is an unspeakable dawn in happy old age.
When a woman is talking to you, listen to what she says with her eyes.
Change your opinions, keep to your principles; change your leaves, keep intact your roots.
There is nothing like a dream to create the future.
The supreme happiness of life is the conviction that we are loved; loved for ourselves, or rather in spite of ourselves.
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.
To love another person is to see the face of God.
A compliment is something like a kiss through a veil.
Hope is the word which God has written on the brow of every man.
The soul has illusions as the bird has wings: it is supported by them.
Peace is the virtue of civilization. War is its crime.
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.
The mountains, the forest, and the sea, render men savage; they develop the fierce, but yet do not destroy the human.
To learn to read is to light a fire; every syllable that is spelled out is a spark.
The ode lives upon the ideal, the epic upon the grandiose, the drama upon the real.
The wicked envy and hate; it is their way of admiring.
Love is a portion of the soul itself, and it is of the same nature as the celestial breathing of the atmosphere of paradise.
There is one thing stronger than all the armies in the world, and that is an idea whose time as come.
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.
Certain thoughts are prayers. There are moments when, whatever be the attitude of the body, the soul is on its knees.
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.
Our life dreams the Utopia. Our death achieves the Ideal.
Habit is the nursery of errors.
Each man should frame life so that at some future hour fact and his dreaming meet.
Jesus wept; Voltaire smiled. From that divine tear and from that human smile is derived the grace of present civilization.
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.
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.
Concision in style, precision in thought, decision in life.
There are thoughts which are prayers. There are moments when, whatever the posture of the body, the soul is on its knees.
Freedom in art, freedom in society, this is the double goal towards which all consistent and logical minds must strive.
Conscience is God present in man.
As the purse is emptied, the heart is filled.
Great perils have this beauty, that they bring to light the fraternity of strangers.
Strong and bitter words indicate a weak cause.
Stupidity talks, vanity acts.
Reaction - a boat which is going against the current but which does not prevent the river from flowing on.
What would be ugly in a garden constitutes beauty in a mountain.
Intelligence is the wife, imagination is the mistress, memory is the servant.
Taste is the common sense of genius.
Short as life is, we make it still shorter by the careless waste of time.
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.
The flesh is the surface of the unknown.
A man is not idle because he is absorbed in thought. There is a visible labor and there is an invisible labor.
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.
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.
To love is to act.
It is by suffering that human beings become angels.
One can resist the invasion of an army but one cannot resist the invasion of ideas.
There are fathers who do not love their children; there is no grandfather who does not adore his grandson.
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.
Our acts make or mar us, we are the children of our own deeds.
Toleration is the best religion.
To rise from error to truth is rare and beautiful.
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.
A faith is a necessity to a man. Woe to him who believes in nothing.
Sorrow is a fruit. God does not make it grow on limbs too weak to bear it.
Joy's smile is much closer to tears than laughter.
Greater than the tread of mighty armies is an idea whose time has come.
We see past time in a telescope and present time in a microscope. Hence the apparent enormities of the present.
When a man is out of sight, it is not too long before he is out of mind.
One sees qualities at a distance and defects at close range.
The first symptom of love in a young man is timidity; in a girl boldness.
Common sense is in spite of, not as the result of education.
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.
Try as you will, you cannot annihilate that eternal relic of the human heart, love.
I don't mind what Congress does, as long as they don't do it in the streets and frighten the horses.
Curiosity is one of the forms of feminine bravery.
When God desires to destroy a thing, he entrusts its destruction to the thing itself. Every bad institution of this world ends by suicide.
Fashions have done more harm than revolutions.
Men become accustomed to poison by degrees.
A great artist is a great man in a great child.
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.
It is nothing to die. It is frightful not to live.
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.
The ideal and the beautiful are identical; the ideal corresponds to the idea, and beauty to form; hence idea and substance are cognate.
Thought is the labor of the intellect, reverie is its pleasure.
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.
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.
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!
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.