Victor Hugo Quotes

Great grief is a divine and terrible radiance which transfigures the wretched.

Mothers arms are made of tenderness, And sweet sleep blesses the child who lies therein.

A house is built of logs and stone, of tiles and posts and piers; a home is built of loving deeds that stand a thousand years.

Life is a flower of which love is honey.

It is man's consolation that the future is to be a sunrise instead of a sunset.

Often the losing of a battle leads to the winning of progress. Less glory but greater liberty: the drum is silent and the voices of reason can be heard.

If a writer wrote merely for his time, I would have to break my pen and throw it away.

Hypocrisy is nothing, in fact, but a horrible hopefulness.

Men hate those to whom they have to lie.

A writer is a world trapped in a person.

Curiosity is gluttony. To see is to devour.

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.

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

The malicious have a dark happiness.

To a gargoyle on the ramparts of Notre Dame as Esmeralda rides off with Gringoire Quasimodo says. "Why was I not made of stone like thee?

He does not weep who does not see.

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

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

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.

Gutenberg's invention of printing is the greatest event-the mother of revolution

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.

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

Promise to give me a kiss on my brow when I am dead.--I shall feel it.

It is the essence of truth that it is never excessive.... We must not resort to the flame where only light is required.

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

Love is the only future God offers.

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.

A compliment is something like a kiss through a veil.

A library implies an act of faith.

The cruel of heart have their own black happiness.

Nature is pitiless; she never withdraws her flowers, her music, her fragrance, and her sunlight from before human cruelty or suffering.

Phenomena intersect; to see but one is to see nothing.

Knowledge is a weight added to conscience.

You ask me what forces me to speak? a strange thing; my conscience.

Tobacco is the plant that converts thoughts into dreams.

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

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

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

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

Waterloo is a battle of the first rank won by a captain of the second

A library implies an act of faith which generations, still in darkness hid, sign in their night in witness of the dawn.

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

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

Whatever causes night in our souls may leave stars.

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

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

Curiosity is one of the forms of feminine bravery.

Stupidity talks, vanity acts.

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

I write with one hand, but I fight with both.