Victor Hugo

We see past time in a telescope and present time in a microscope. Hence the apparent enormities of the present.
Victor Hugo

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

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

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

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.
Victor Hugo

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

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

Do not let it be your aim to be something, but to be someone.
Victor Hugo

Because one doesn’t like the way things are is no reason to be unjust towards God.
Victor Hugo

It is by suffering that human beings become angels.
Victor Hugo

Life’s greatest happiness is to be convinced we are loved.
Victor Hugo

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

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

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

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

A faith is a necessity to a man. Woe to him who believes in nothing.
Victor Hugo

Concision in style, precision in thought, decision in life.
Victor Hugo

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

Fashions have done more harm than revolutions.
Victor Hugo

Despotism is a long crime.
Victor Hugo

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

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

Our life dreams the Utopia. Our death achieves the Ideal.
Victor Hugo

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

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

Short as life is, we make it still shorter by the careless waste of time.
Victor Hugo

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

Conscience is God present in man.
Victor Hugo

Forty is the old age of youth; fifty the youth of old age.
Victor Hugo

Genius: the superhuman in man.
Victor Hugo

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

Liberation is not deliverance.
Victor Hugo

My tastes are aristocratic, my actions democratic.
Victor Hugo

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

As the purse is emptied, the heart is filled.
Victor Hugo

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

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

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

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

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

Curiosity is one of the forms of feminine bravery.
Victor Hugo

Peace is the virtue of civilization. War is its crime.
Victor Hugo

Rhyme, that enslaved queen, that supreme charm of our poetry, that creator of our meter.
Victor Hugo

Scepticism, that dry caries of the intelligence.
Victor Hugo

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

Freedom in art, freedom in society, this is the double goal towards which all consistent and logical minds must strive.
Victor Hugo

Genius is a promontory jutting out into the infinite.
Victor Hugo

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

Habit is the nursery of errors.
Victor Hugo

Initiative is doing the right thing without being told.
Victor Hugo

A compliment is something like a kiss through a veil.
Victor Hugo

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

Mankind is not a circle with a single center but an ellipse with two focal points of which facts are one and ideas the other.
Victor Hugo

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

He who opens a school door, closes a prison.
Victor Hugo

Many great actions are committed in small struggles.
Victor Hugo

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

Men become accustomed to poison by degrees.
Victor Hugo

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

Joy’s smile is much closer to tears than laughter.
Victor Hugo

Laughter is the sun that drives winter from the human face.
Victor Hugo

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

Virtue has a veil, vice a mask.
Victor Hugo

Each man should frame life so that at some future hour fact and his dreaming meet.
Victor Hugo

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

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

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

Intelligence is the wife, imagination is the mistress, memory is the servant.
Victor Hugo

Life is the flower for which love is the honey.
Victor Hugo

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

A creditor is worse than a slave-owner; for the master owns only your person, but a creditor owns your dignity, and can command it.
Victor Hugo

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