Top 990 Quotes & Sayings by Victor Hugo - Page 2

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

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.

Liberation is not deliverance.

Puns are the droppings of soaring wits.

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.

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.

In the French language, there is a great gulf between prose and poetry; in English, there is hardly any difference. It is a splendid privilege of the great literary languages Greek, Latin, and French that they possess a prose. English has not this privilege. There is no prose in English.

To love is to act.

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

As a means of contrast with the sublime, the grotesque is, in our view, the richest source that nature can offer.

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

Common sense is in spite of, not as the result of education.

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

The brutalities of progress are called revolutions. When they are over we realize this: that the human race has been roughly handled, but that it has advanced.

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

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 by suffering that human beings become angels.

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

No one can keep a secret better than a child.

A society that admits misery, a humanity that admits war, seem to me an inferior society and a debased humanity; it is a higher society and a more elevated humanity at which I am aiming - a society without kings, a humanity without barriers.

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

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

Great perils have this beauty, that they bring to light the fraternity of strangers.

The learned man knows that he is ignorant.

Strong and bitter words indicate a weak cause.

The first symptom of love in a young man is timidity; in a girl boldness.

The mountains, the forest, and the sea, render men savage; they develop the fierce, but yet do not destroy the human.

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.

To rise from error to truth is rare and beautiful.

By putting forward the hands of the clock you shall not advance the hour.

Reaction - a boat which is going against the current but which does not prevent the river from flowing on.

The wise man does not grow old, but ripens.

He who is not capable of enduring poverty is not capable of being free.

Men become accustomed to poison by degrees.

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!

Without vanity, without coquetry, without curiosity, in a word, without the fall, woman would not be woman. Much of her grace is in her frailty.

Curiosity is one of the forms of feminine bravery.

What would be ugly in a garden constitutes beauty in a mountain.

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!

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.

The last resort of kings, the cannonball. The last resort of the people, the paving stone.

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.

Toleration is the best religion.

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.

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

When God desires to destroy a thing, he entrusts its destruction to the thing itself. Every bad institution of this world ends by suicide.

What a grand thing, to be loved! What a grander thing still, to love!

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 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.

Jesus wept; Voltaire smiled. From that divine tear and from that human smile is derived the grace of present civilization.

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

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

Fashions have done more harm than revolutions.

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

A great artist is a great man in a great child.

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.

Greater than the tread of mighty armies is an idea whose time has come.

The most powerful symptom of love is a tenderness which becomes at times almost insupportable.

A man is not idle because he is absorbed in thought. There is a visible labor and there is an invisible labor.

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.