Victor Hugo Quotes (468 Quotes)

I have been loving you a little more every minute since this morning.

Let us admit, without bitterness, that the individual has his distinct interests and can, without felony, stipulate for those interests and defend them. The present has its pardonable amount of egotism; momentary life has its claims, and cannot be expected to sacrifice itself incessantly to the future. The generation which is in its turn passing over the earth is not forced to abridge its life for the sake of the generations, its equals after all, whose turn shall come later on.

No Prefect of Police believes that a cat can turn into a lion; nevertheless the thing happens...

See Monsieur Geborand, buying a pennyworth of paradise.

The counterfeits of the past take assumed names, and are fond of calling themselves the future. That eternally returning spector, the past, not infrequently falsifies its passport.

The realities of life do not allow themselves to be forgotten.

This cavern is below all, and the enemy of all; it is hatred, without exception.

What a great thing, to be loved! What a greater thing still, to love! The heart becomes heroic though passion…if no one loved, the sun would go out.

A one-eyed man is much more incomplete than a blind man, for he knows what it is that's lacking.

Nothing makes a man so adventurous as an empty pocket.

Initiative is doing the right thing without being told.

Many great actions are committed in small struggles.

Genius is a promontory jutting out into the infinite.

Stupidity talks, vanity acts.

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.

Life is a voyage.

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

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

Strong and bitter words indicate a weak cause.

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.

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.

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

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.

Ask not the name of him who asks you for a bed. It is especially he whose name is a burden to him, who has need of an asylum (room).

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.

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

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

Habit is the nursery of errors.

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

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.

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.

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

If it were (Is it not) outrageous that society should treat with such rigid precision those of its members who were most poorly endowed in the distribution or wealth that chance had made, and who were, therefore, most worthy of indulgence.

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

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

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

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

What I feel for you seems less of earth and more of a cloudless heaven.

The wise man does not grow old, but ripens.

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

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.

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

Popularity It's glory's small change.

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

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

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

In the Twentieth Century war will be dead, the scaffold will be dead, hatred will be dead, frontier boundaries will be dead, dogmas will be dead man will live. He will possess something higher than all thesea great country, the whole earth, and a great hope, the whole heaven.

There are obstinate and unknown braves who defend themselves inch by inch in the shadows against the fatal invasion of want and turpitude. There are noble and mysterious triumphs which no eye sees. No renown rewards, and no flourish of trumpets salutes. Life, misfortune, isolation, abandonment, and poverty and battlefields which have their heroes.

To love is to act.

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.