Victor Hugo Quotes (468 Quotes)

The greatest blunders, like the thickest ropes, are often compounded of a multitude of strands. Take the rope apart, separate it into the small threads that compose it, and you can break them one by one. You think, That is all there was But twist

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

You say, 'Where goest Thou' I cannot tell, And still go on. But if the way be straight I cannot go amiss before me lies Dawn and the day the night behind me that Suffices me I break the bounds I see, And nothing more believe and nothing less. My future is not one of my concerns.

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

Wisdom is a sacred communion.

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

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

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

He who opens a school door, closes a prison.

Adversity makes men, and prosperity makes monsters.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

A library implies an act of faith.

There are people who observe the rules of honor as we observe the stars from a distance

There is nothing as exciting as an idea whose time has come

I put a Phrygian cap on the old dictionary.

Nothing can be more depressing than to expose, naked to the light of thought, the hideous growth of argot. Indeed it is like a sort of repellent animal intended to dwell in darkness which has been dragged out of its cloaca. One seems to see a horned and living creature viciously struggling to be restored to the place where it belongs. One word is like a claw, another like a sightless and bleeding eye and there are phrases which clutch like the pincers of a crab. And all of it is alive with the hideous vitality of things that have organized themselves amid disorganization.

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

Caution is the eldest child of wisdom.

The beautiful is as useful. Perhaps more so.

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

Life, misfortunes, isolation, abandonment, poverty, are battlefields which have their heroes obscure heroes, sometimes greater than the illustrious heroes

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

Fashions have done more harm than revolutions.

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

The ox suffers, the cart complains.

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!

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

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

The learned man knows that he is ignorant.

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

Despotism is a long crime.

Puns are the droppings of soaring wits.

Despots play their part in the works of thinkers. Fettered words are terrible words. The writer doubles and trebles the power of his writing when a ruler imposes silence on the people. Something emerges from that enforced silence, a mysterious fullness which filters through and becomes steely in the thought. Repression in history leads to conciseness in the historian, and the rocklike hardness of much celebrated prose is due to the tempering of the tyrant.

The production of souls is the secret of unfathomable depth.

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

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.

England has two books the Bible and Shakespeare. England made Shakespeare but the Bible made England.

From the oyster to the eagle, from the swine to the tiger, all animals are to be found in men and each of them exists in some man, sometimes several at the time. Animals are nothing but the portrayal of our virtues and vices made manifest to our eyes, the visible reflections of our souls. God displays them to us to give us food for thought.

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

I'm religiously opposed to religion.

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.

Melancholy is the pleasure of being sad.

The convent, which belongs to the West as it does to the East, to antiquity as it does to the present time, to Buddhism and Muhammadanism as it does to Christianity, is one of the optical devices whereby man gains a glimpse of infinity.

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

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