Top 990 Quotes & Sayings by Victor Hugo - Page 3

The flesh is the surface of the unknown.

Love that is not jealous is neither true nor pure.

Many great actions are committed in small struggles.

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

Stupidity talks, vanity acts.

A poet who is a bad man is a degraded being, baser and more culpable than a bad man who is not a poet.

Despotism is a long crime.

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.

To think of shadows is a serious thing.

Nature has made a pebble and a female. The lapidary makes the diamond, and the lover makes the woman.

Well, for us, in history where goodness is a rare pearl, he who was good almost takes precedence over he who was great.

I'm religiously opposed to religion.

Doing nothing is happiness for children and misery for old men.

Smallness in a great man seems smaller by its disproportion with all the rest.

But when ill indeed, Even dismissing the doctor don't always succeed.

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.

Men like me are impossible until the day when they become necessary.

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.

Almost all our desires, when examined, contain something too shameful to reveal.

Wisdom is a sacred communion.

My tastes are aristocratic, my actions democratic.

I put a Phrygian cap on the old dictionary.

To be perfectly happy it does not suffice to possess happiness, it is necessary to have deserved it.

I love all men who think, even those who think otherwise than myself.

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

A noble soul and real poetic talent are almost always inseparable.

My childhood began, as everybody's childhood begins, with prejudices. Man finds prejudices beside his cradle, puts them from him a little in the course of his career, and often, alas! takes to them again in his old age.

Love, in the eyes of the world, is either a carnal appetite or a vague fancy, which possession extinguishes or absence destroys. That is why it is commonly said, with a strange abuse of words, that passion does not endure.

The beautiful has but one type, the ugly has a thousand.

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

Taste is the common sense of genius.

What Shakespeare was able to do in English he would certainly not have done in French.

Never laugh at those who suffer; suffer sometimes those who laugh.

It is often necessary to know how to obey a woman in order sometimes to have the right to command her.

Pain is as diverse as man. One suffers as one can.

It is most pleasant to commit a just action which is disagreeable to someone whom one does not like.

Verse in itself does not constitute poetry. Verse is only an elegant vestment for a beautiful form. Poetry can express itself in prose, but it does so more perfectly under the grace and majesty of verse. It is poetry of soul that inspires noble sentiments and noble actions as well as noble writings.

When liberty returns, I will return.

The ox suffers, the cart complains.

I would have liked to be - indeed, I should have been - a second Rembrandt.

Genius is a promontory jutting out into the infinite.

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

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

Habit is the nursery of errors.

Sublime upon sublime scarcely presents a contrast, and we need a little rest from everything, even the beautiful.

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.

One sees qualities at a distance and defects at close range.

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

Indigestion is charged by God with enforcing morality on the stomach.

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.

Idleness is the heaviest of all oppressions.

I don't mind what Congress does, as long as they don't do it in the streets and frighten the horses.

When a man understands the art of seeing, he can trace the spirit of an age and the features of a king even in the knocker on a door.

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.

Genius: the superhuman in man.

To think is of itself to be useful; it is always and in all cases a striving toward God.

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

Close by the Rights of Man, at the least set beside them, are the Rights of the Spirit.

To contemplate is to look at shadows.

One of the hardest tasks is to extract continually from one's soul an almost inexhaustible ill will.