Victor Hugo Quotes
-
Is there not in every human soul a primitive spark, a divine element, incorruptible in this world and immortal in the next, which can be developed by goodness, kindled, lit up, and made to radiate, and which evil can never entirely extinguish.
-
Idleness is a mother. She has a son, robbery, and a daughter, hunger.
-
Let us study things that are no more. It is necessary to understand them, if only to avoid them.
-
He left her. She was dissatisfied with him. He had preferred to incur her anger rather than cause her pain. He had kept all the pain for himself.
-
The heart becomes heroic through passion. It is no longer composed of anything but what is pure; it no longer rests upon anything but what is elevated and great.
-
Tobacco is the plant that converts thoughts into dreams.
-
The earlier works of a man of genius are always preferred to the newer ones, in order to prove that he is going down instead of up.
-
O youth! thou often tearest thy wings against the thorns of voluptuousness.
-
Reality in strong doses frightens.
-
The clouds, - the only birds that never sleep.
-
There are no trifles in the human story, no trifling leaves on the tree.
-
True thinkers are characterized by a blending of clearness and mystery.
-
The aim of art is almost divine: to bring to life again if it is writing history, to create if it is writing poetry.
-
She was sad with an obscure sadness of which she had not the secret herself. There was in her whole person the stupor of a life ended but never commenced.
-
If he had had all Peru in his pocket, he would certainly have given it to this dancer; but Gringoire had not Peru in his pocket; and besides, America was not yet discovered.
-
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.
-
It is often our best friends who throw us down.
-
For sight is woman-like and shuns the old.
-
I think I missed my calling. I should have been an interior decorator.
-
Can human nature ever be wholly and radically transformed? Can the man whom God made good be made wicked by man? Can the soul be reshaped in its entirety by destiny and made evil because destiny is evil? Can the heart become misshapen and afflicted with ugly, incurable deformities under disproportionate misfortune, like a spinal column bent beneath a too low roof?
-
You who suffer because you love, love still more. To die of love, is to live by it.
-
Nothing is more imminent than the impossible . . . what we must always foresee is the unforeseen.
-
For, to make deserts, God, who rules mankind, Begins with kings, and ends the work by wind.
-
Profound hearts, wise minds, take life as God makes it; it is a long trial, and unintelligible preparation for the unknown destiny.