Victor Hugo Quotes

She might have melted a heart of stone, but nothing can melt a heart of wood.

You preserve your shame but you kill your glory.

The need of the immaterial is the most deeply rooted of all needs. One must have bread; but before bread, one must have the ideal.

Give to a being the useless, and deprive him of the needful, and you have the gamin.

So a voice in the mountain is enough to let loose an avalanche. A word too much may be followed by a caving in. If the word had not been spoken, it would not have happened.

Table talk and Lovers' talk equally elude the grasp; Lovers' talk is clouds, table talk is smoke.

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

Everything bows to success, even grammar.

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

Dirt has been shrewdly termed "misplaced material.

Dark Error's other hidden side is truth.

God whose gifts in gracious flood Unto all who seek are sent, Only asks you to be good And is content.

God has bestowed two gifts on man: hope and ignorance. Ignorance is the better of the two.

A cannonball travels only two thousand miles an hour; light travels two hundred thousand miles a second. Such is the superiority of Jesus Christ over Napoleon.

God put in man thought; society, action; nature, revery.

Whom man kills, him God restoreth to life.

If you would civilize a man, begin with his grandmother.

He was fond of books, for they are cool and sure friends

Enthusiasm is the fever of reason.

For sight is woman-like and shuns the old.

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.'

Why worry about what threatens our heads or purses? Let us think instead of what threatens our souls.

A joyous little creature, so beautiful, It was as if a gate of Heaven opened as she came in.

Heaven, on occasion, half opens its arms to us; and that is the great moment.

No man is more unhappy than the one who is never in adversity; the greatest affliction of life is never to be afflicted.

When, like an Emir of tyrannic power, Sirius appears, and on the horizon black Bids countless stars pursue their mighty track.

The persistence of an all-absorbing idea is terrible.

There are no weeds, and no worthless men. There are only bad farmers.

...there is a point when the unfortunate and the infamous are associated and confused in a word, a mortal word, les miserables

We are on the side of religion as opposed to religions, and we are among those who believe in the wretched inadequacy of sermons and the sublimity of prayer.

God was bored by him.

Brothers, he who dies here dies in the radiance of the future, and we are entering a tomb all flooded with the dawn.

Who then understands the reciprocal flux and reflux of the infinitely great and the infinitely small, the echoing of causes in the abysses of being, and the avalanches of creation?

Every idea must have a visible enfolding.

Inanimate objects sometimes appear endowed with a strange power of sight. A statue notices, a tower watches, the face of an edifice contemplates.

A wretched woman is more unfortunate than a wretched man.

Everything Changes. The only thing that remains immovable across the centuries and fixes the character of a people is cooking.

It seems as though, at the approach of a certain dark hour, the light of heaven infills those who are leaving the light of earth.

Marius was of the temperament that sinks into grief and remains there; Cosette was of the sort that plunges in and comes out again.

Genius is a promontory jutting out into the infinite.

Whenever a man's friends begin to compliment him about looking young, he may be sure that they think he is growing old.

No religion but blasphemes a little.

The English took the eagle and Austrians the eaglet. [Fr., L'Angleterre prit l'aigle, et l'Autriche l'aiglon.]

There is no more sovereign eloquence than the truth in indignation.

The straight line, a respectable optical illusion which ruins many a man.

Loving is half of believing.

It is only barbarous nations who have a sudden growth after a victory

There are moments when a rope's end, a pole, the branch of the tree, is life itself, and it is a frightful thing to see a living being lose his hold upon it, and fall like a ripe fruit.

Nothing is more dangerous than discontinued labor; it is habit lost. A habit easy to abandon, difficult to resume.

Where no plan is laid, where the disposal of time is surrendered merely to the chance of incident, chaos will soon reign.