Victor Hugo Quotes

Many great actions are committed in small struggles.

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

The soul helps the body, and at certain moments raises it. It is the only bird that sustains its cage.

People weighed down with troubles do not look back; they know only too well that misfortune stalks them.

A queen, devoid of beauty is not queen; She needs the royalty of beauty's mien.

The aim of art is almost divine: to bring to life again if it is writing history, to create if it is writing poetry.

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.

God is behind everything, but everything hides God.

Excitement is not enjoyment: in calmness lies true pleasure. The most precious wines are sipped, not bolted at a swallow.

As we have explained, in first love the soul is taken long before the body; later the body is taken long before the soul; sometimes the soul is not taken at all.

Idleness is a mother. She has a son, robbery, and a daughter, hunger.

Now life has killed the dream I dreamed.

Where the telescope ends the microscope begins, and which has the wider vision?

Nothing is really small; whoever is open to the deep penetration of nature knows this.

Art needs no spur beyond itself.

How frightened hypocrisy hastens to defend itself.

The guilty one is not he who commits the sin, but he who causes the darkness.

For dogs we kings should have lions, and for cats, tigers. The great benefits a crown.

I didn't believe it could be so monstrous. It's wrong to be so absorbed in divine law as not to perceive human law. Death belongs to God alone. By what right do men tough that unknown thing?

A few feet under the ground reigns so profound a silence, and yet so much tumult on the surface!

Nothing is more true, more real, than the primeval magnetic disturbances that two souls may communicate to one another, through the tiny sparks of a moment's glance.

War can only be qualified by its object, and there is neither foreign war nor civil war, there is only just or unjust war.

What says the law? You will not kill. How does it say it? By killing!

The nearer I approach the end, the plainer I hear around me the immortal symphonies of the worlds which invite me. It is marvelous, yet simple.

Let the one fight for his flag, and the other for his ideal, and let them both imagine that they are fighting for the country; the strife will be colossal.

The paradise of the rich is made out of the hell of the poor.

Years place at last a venerable crown upon a head.

Popularity? It's glory's small change.

But alas, if I have not maintained my victory, it is God's fault for not making man and the devil of equal strength.

For there are many great deeds done in the small struggles of life.

Animals are nothing but the portrayal of our virtues and vices made manifest to our eyes, the visible reflections of our souls.

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

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

Success is an ugly thing. Men are deceived by its false resemblances to merit.... They confound the brilliance of the firmament with the star-shaped footprints of a duck in the mud.

. . .where there is no more hope, song remains.

A day will come when there will be no battlefields, but markets opening to commerce and minds opening to ideas.

Scepticism, that dry caries of the intelligence.

Habit is the nursery of errors.

Architecture has recorded the great ideas of the human race. Not only every religious symbol, but every human thought has its page in that vast book.

And do you know Monsieur Marius? I believe I was a little in love with you.

There comes an hour when protest no longer suffices; after philosophy there must be action; the strong hand finishes what the idea has sketched.

To die for lack of love is horrible. The asphyxia of the soul.

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.

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

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!

If you are leaving that sorrowful place with hate and anger against men, you are worthy of compassion; if you leave it with good will, gentleness and peace, you are better than any of us.

The thirst for the Infinite proves infinity.

There is no vacuum in the human heart. Certain demolitions take place, and it is well that they do, but on condition that they are followed by reconstructions.

I'd rather be hissed at for a good verse, than applauded for a bad one.

God created the flirt as soon as he made the fool.