A man is not idle because he is absorbed in thought. There is a visible labor and there is an invisible labor.
Victor Hugo
6
A mother's arms are made of tenderness and children sleep soundly in them.
Victor Hugo
7
A war between Europeans is a civil war.
Victor Hugo
8
Adversity makes men, and prosperity makes monsters.
Victor Hugo
9
Almost all our desires, when examined, contain something too shameful to reveal.
Victor Hugo
10
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.
Victor Hugo
11
An intelligent hell would be better than a stupid paradise.
Victor Hugo
12
An invasion of armies can be resisted, but not an idea whose time has come.
Victor Hugo
13
An invasion of armies can be resisted, but not the invasion of ideas.
Victor Hugo
14
As a means of contrast with the sublime, the grotesque is, in our view, the richest source that nature can offer.
Victor Hugo
15
As the purse is emptied, the heart is filled.
Victor Hugo
16
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.
Victor Hugo
17
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.
Victor Hugo
18
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.
Victor Hugo
19
Because one doesn't like the way things are is no reason to be unjust towards God.
Victor Hugo
20
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!
Victor Hugo
21
But when ill indeed, Even dismissing the doctor don't always succeed.
Victor Hugo
22
By putting forward the hands of the clock you shall not advance the hour.
Victor Hugo
23
Certain thoughts are prayers. There are moments when, whatever be the attitude of the body, the soul is on its knees.
Victor Hugo
24
Change your opinions, keep to your principles; change your leaves, keep intact your roots.
Victor Hugo
25
Close by the Rights of Man, at the least set beside them, are the Rights of the Spirit.
Victor Hugo
26
Common sense is in spite of, not as the result of education.
Victor Hugo
27
Curiosity is one of the forms of feminine bravery.
Victor Hugo
28
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.
Victor Hugo
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.
Victor Hugo
40
He who is not capable of enduring poverty is not capable of being free.
Victor Hugo
41
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.
Victor Hugo
42
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.
Victor Hugo
43
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!
Victor Hugo
44
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.
Victor Hugo
45
I love all men who think, even those who think otherwise than myself.
Victor Hugo
46
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.
Victor Hugo
47
I put a Phrygian cap on the old dictionary.
Victor Hugo
Life's greatest happiness is to be convinced we are loved.
Victor Hugo
59
Love is a portion of the soul itself, and it is of the same nature as the celestial breathing of the atmosphere of paradise.
Victor Hugo
60
Many great actions are committed in small struggles.
Victor Hugo
61
Men like me are impossible until the day when they become necessary.
Victor Hugo
62
Music expresses that which cannot be put into words and cannot remain silent.
Victor Hugo
63
Music expresses that which cannot be said and on which it is impossible to be silent.
Victor Hugo
64
My tastes are aristocratic, my actions democratic.
Victor Hugo
65
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.
Victor Hugo
66
Nature has made a pebble and a female. The lapidary makes the diamond, and the lover makes the woman.
Victor Hugo
67
No one can keep a secret better than a child.
Victor Hugo
68
No one ever keeps a secret so well as a child.
Victor Hugo
69
Nothing else in the world... not all the armies... is so powerful as an idea whose time has come.
Victor Hugo
70
One believes others will do what he will do to himself.
Victor Hugo
71
One can resist the invasion of an army but one cannot resist the invasion of ideas.
Victor Hugo
72
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.
Victor Hugo
73
One of the hardest tasks is to extract continually from one's soul an almost inexhaustible ill will.
Victor Hugo
74
One sees qualities at a distance and defects at close range.
Victor Hugo
75
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.'
Victor Hugo
76
Our acts make or mar us, we are the children of our own deeds.
Victor Hugo
77
Our life dreams the Utopia. Our death achieves the Ideal.
Victor Hugo
78
Pain is as diverse as man. One suffers as one can.
Victor Hugo
79
Peace is the virtue of civilization. War is its crime.
Victor Hugo
80
People do not lack strength; they lack will.
Victor Hugo
Prayer is an august avowal of ignorance.
Victor Hugo
83
Puns are the droppings of soaring wits.
Victor Hugo
84
Reaction - a boat which is going against the current but which does not prevent the river from flowing on.
Victor Hugo
85
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.
Victor Hugo
86
Rhyme, that enslaved queen, that supreme charm of our poetry, that creator of our meter.
Victor Hugo
87
Scepticism, that dry caries of the intelligence.
Victor Hugo
88
Smallness in a great man seems smaller by its disproportion with all the rest.
Victor Hugo
89
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.
Victor Hugo
90
Sorrow is a fruit. God does not make it grow on limbs too weak to bear it.
Victor Hugo
91
Strong and bitter words indicate a weak cause.
Victor Hugo
The animal is ignorant of the fact that he knows. The man is aware of the fact that he is ignorant.
Victor Hugo
97
The beautiful has but one type, the ugly has a thousand.
Victor Hugo
98
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.
Victor Hugo
99
The first symptom of love in a young man is shyness; the first symptom in a woman, it's boldness.
Victor Hugo
100
The first symptom of love in a young man is timidity; in a girl boldness.
Victor Hugo
101
The flesh is the surface of the unknown.
Victor Hugo
102
The greatest happiness of life is the conviction that we are loved; loved for ourselves, or rather, loved in spite of ourselves.
Victor Hugo
103
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.
Victor Hugo
104
The last resort of kings, the cannonball. The last resort of the people, the paving stone.
Victor Hugo
105
The learned man knows that he is ignorant.
Victor Hugo
106
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.
Victor Hugo
107
The man who does not know other languages, unless he is a man of genius, necessarily has deficiencies in his ideas.
Victor Hugo
108
The mountains, the forest, and the sea, render men savage; they develop the fierce, but yet do not destroy the human.
Victor Hugo
109
The ode lives upon the ideal, the epic upon the grandiose, the drama upon the real.
Victor Hugo
The soul has illusions as the bird has wings: it is supported by them.
Victor Hugo
112
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.
Victor Hugo
113
The wicked envy and hate; it is their way of admiring.
Victor Hugo
114
There are fathers who do not love their children; there is no grandfather who does not adore his grandson.
Victor Hugo
115
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.
Victor Hugo
116
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.
Victor Hugo
117
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.
Victor Hugo
118
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.
Victor Hugo
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.
Victor Hugo
132
We see past time in a telescope and present time in a microscope. Hence the apparent enormities of the present.
Victor Hugo
133
What is history? An echo of the past in the future; a reflex from the future on the past.
Victor Hugo
134
What would be ugly in a garden constitutes beauty in a mountain.
Victor Hugo
135
When a man is out of sight, it is not too long before he is out of mind.
Victor Hugo
136
When God desires to destroy a thing, he entrusts its destruction to the thing itself. Every bad institution of this world ends by suicide.
Victor Hugo
137
When grace is joined with wrinkles, it is adorable. There is an unspeakable dawn in happy old age.
Victor Hugo
