Top 990 Quotes & Sayings by Victor Hugo - Page 5

The rich's paradise was created by the poor's hell.

Music expresses that which cannot be put into words.

Whatever causes night in our souls may leave stars.

You can give without loving, but you can never love without giving. The great acts of love are done by those who are habitually performing small acts of kindness. We pardon to the extent that we love. Love is knowing that even when you are alone, you will never be lonely again. & great happiness of life is the conviction that we are loved. Loved for ourselves. & even loved in spite of ourselves.

If the soul is left in darkness, sins will be committed. The guilty one is not he who commits the sin, but the one who causes the darkness.

The delight we inspire in others has this enchanting peculiarity that, far from being diminished like every other reflection, it returns to us more radiant than ever.

To sum up all, let it be known that science and religion are two identical words. The learned do not suspect this, no more do the religious. These two words express the two sides of the same fact, which is the infinite. Religion-Science, this is the future of the human mind.

Death belongs to God alone; by what right do men touch that unknown thing?

What a gloomy thing, not to know the address of one's soul.

Go to sleep in peace. God is awake.

There is always more misery among the lower classes than there is humanity in the higher.

Reason is intelligence taking exercise. Imagination is intelligence with an erection.

God knows better than we do what we need.

As with stomachs, we should pity minds that do not eat.

Wisdom is the health of the soul.

God has made the cat to give man the pleasure of caressing the tiger.

In short, I am doing what I can, I suffer with the same universal suffering, and I try to assuage it, I possess only the puny forces of a man, and I cry to all: “Help me!

If God had intended that man should go backward, he would have given him eyes in the back of his head.

Freedom begins where it ends ignorance.

Love each other dearly always. There is scarcely anything else in the world but that: to love one another.

Revolutions are not born of chance but of necessity.

Let us fear the worst, but work with faith; the best will always take care of itself.

Everything speaks: the flowing airstream and the sailing halycon, the blade of grass, the flower, the bud, the element; did you imagine the universe to be otherwise?

A criminal remains a criminal whether he uses a convict's suit or a monarch's crown.

To rise at six, to dine at ten, To sup at six, to sleep at ten, Makes a man live for ten times ten.

You who suffer because you love, love still more. To die of love, is to live by it.

Melancholy is the pleasure of being sad.

Superstition, bigotry and prejudice, ghosts though they are, cling tenaciously to life; they are shades armed with tooth and claw. They must be grappled with unceasingly, for it is a fateful part of human destiny that it is condemned to wage perpetual war against ghosts. A shade is not easily taken by the throat and destroyed.

What is called honors and dignities, and even honor and dignity, is generally fool's gold.

We teachers make the road, others will make the journey.

The death agony of the barricade was about to begin.For, since the preceding evening, the two rows of houses in the Rue de la Chanvrerie had become two walls; ferocious walls, doors closed, windows closed, shutters closed. A house is an escarpment, a door is a refusal, a facade is a wall. This wall hears, sees and will not. It might open and save you. No. This wall is a judge. It gazes at you and condemns you. What dismal things are closed houses.

Logic ignores the almost, just as the sun ignores the candle.

If a man has his throat cut in Paris, it's a murder. If 50,000 people are murdered in the east, it is a question.

Not seeing people allows you to think of them as perfect in all kinds of ways.

It is not enough to be happy, one must be content.

The thirst for the Infinite proves infinity.

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

He was at his own request and through his own complicity driven out of all his happinesses one after the other; and he had this sorrow, that after having lost Cosette wholly in one day, he was afterwards obliged to lose her again in detail.

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

Caution is the eldest child of wisdom.

Morality is truth in full bloom.

God made only water, but man made wine.

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.

Woe, alas, to those who have loved only bodies, forms, appearances! Death will rob them of everything. Try to love souls, you will find them again.

When a person opens a book, he can never be in prison.

Proverty and wealth are comparative sins.

A writer is a world trapped in a person.

Separated lovers cheat absence by a thousand fancies which have their own reality. They are prevented from seeing one another and they cannot write; nevertheless they find countless mysterious ways of corresponding, by sending each other the song of birds, the scent of flowers, the laughter of children.

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.

It is God who makes woman beautiful, it is the devil who makes her pretty.

When you get an idea into your head you find it in everything.

Love is the only future God offers.

Love is the foolishness of men, and the wisdom of God.

Men hate those to whom they have to lie.

Inspiration and genius -one and the same.

What makes night within us may leave stars.

To have lied is to have suffered.

Another story must begin!

Man's greatest actions are performed in minor struggles. Life, misfortune, isolation, abandonment and poverty are battlefields which have their heroes - obscure heroes who are at times greater than illustrious heroes.

The quantity of civilization is measured by the quality of imagination.