Victor Hugo Quotes
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Primitive times are lyrical, ancient times epical, modern times dramatic. The ode sings of eternity, the epic imparts solemnity tohistory, the drama depicts life. The characteristic of the first poetry is ingeniousness, of the second, simplicity, of the third, truth.
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Now, one cannot read nonsense with impunity.
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These Greek capitals, black with age, and quite deeply graven in the stone, with I know not what signs peculiar to Gothic calligraphy imprinted upon their forms and upon their attitudes, as though with the purpose of revealing that it had been a hand of the Middle Ages which had inscribed them there, and especially the fatal and melancholy meaning contained in them, struck the author deeply.
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There are many tongues to talk, and but few heads to think.
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Give to a being the useless, and deprive him of the needful, and you have the gamin.
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It is often our best friends who throw us down.
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There are people who observe the rules of honor as one observes the stars, from a great distance.
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Nothing is more imminent than the impossible . . . what we must always foresee is the unforeseen.
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Love is reducing the universe to one being.
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God put in man thought; society, action; nature, revery.
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There is suffering in the light; in excess it burns. Flame is hostile to the wing. To burn and yet to fly, this is the miracle of genius.
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To rove about, musing, that is to say loitering, is, for a philosopher, a good way of spending time.
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Do not economize on the hymeneal rites; do not prune them of their splendor, nor split farthings on the day when you are radiant. A wedding is not house-keeping.
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The transept belfry and the two towers were to him three great cages, the birds in which, taught by him, would sing for him alone. Yet it was these same bells which had made him deaf; but mothers are often fondest of the child who has made them suffer most.
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Nothing can be sadder or more profound than to see a thousand things for the first and last time.
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During a wise man's whole life, his destiny holds his philosophy in a state of siege.
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For sight is woman-like and shuns the old.
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We shall not attempt to give the reader an idea of that tetrahedron nose-that horse-shoe mouth-that small left eye over-shadowed by a red bushy brow, while the right eye disappeared entirely under an enormous wart-of those straggling teeth with breaches here and there like the battlements of a fortress-of that horny lip, over which one of those teeth projected like the tusk of an elephant-of that forked chin-and, above all, of the expression diffused over the whole-that mixture of malice, astonishment, and melancholy. Let the reader, if he can, figure to himself this combination.
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Philosophy is the microscope of thought.
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The sewer is the conscience of the city.
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Let us fear ourselves. Prejudices are the real robbers; vices are the real murderers. The great dangers lie within ourselves.
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Between the government which does evil and the people who accept it - there is a certain shameful solidarity.
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From a political point of view, there is but one principle, the sovereignty of man over himself. This sovereignty of myself over myself is called Liberty.
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Algebra applies to the clouds.