Victor Hugo Quotes
-
There is will in the thought, there is none in the dream. The dream, which is completely spontaneous, takes and keeps, even in the gigantic and the ideal, the form of our mind. Nothing springs more directly and more sincerely from the very bottom of our souls than our unreflected and indefinite aspirations towards the splendours of destiny.
-
If suffer we must, let's suffer on the heights.
-
Waterloo is a battle of the first rank won by a captain of the second.
-
A bird sings, a child prattles, but it is the same hymn; hymn indistinct, inarticulate, but full of profound meaning.
-
Civilization survives on the constant discovery of amity and an equal supply of damnation.
-
God in his harmony has equal ends For cedar that resists and reed that bends; For good it is a woman sometimes rules, Holds in her hand the power, and manners, schools, And laws, and mind; succeeding master proud, With gentle voice and smil.
-
There comes an hour when protest no longer suffices; after philosophy there must be action; the strong hand finishes what the idea has sketched.
-
Foppery is the egotism of clothes.
-
That is to be two and to be but one. A man and a woman mingled into one angel. It is heaven.
-
Dry happiness is like dry bread. We eat, but we do not dine. I wish for the superfluous, for the useless, for the extravagant, for the too much, for that which is not good for anything.
-
It is in the name of Moses that Bellarmin thunderstrikes Galileo; and this great vulgarizer of the great seeker Copernicus, Galileo, the old man of truth, the magian of the heavens, was reduced to repeating on his knees word for word after the inquisitor this formula of shame: "Corde sincera et fide non ficta abjuro maledico et detestor supradictos errores et hereses." Falsehood put an ass's hood on science.
-
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?
-
Life is a theatre set in which there are but few practicable entrances.
-
To rove about, musing, that is to say loitering, is, for a philosopher, a good way of spending time, especially in that kind of mock rurality, ugly but odd, and partaking of two natures, which surrounds certain large cities, particularly Paris.
-
No man is more unhappy than the one who is never in adversity; the greatest affliction of life is never to be afflicted.
-
Where would the shout of love begin, if not from the summit of sacrifice?
-
What is said about men often has as much influence upon their lives, and especially upon their destinies, as what they do.
-
Being good is easy, what is difficult is being just.
-
True or false, that which is said of men often occupies as important a place in their lives, and above all in their destinies, as that which they do.
-
It is those books which a man possesses but does not read which constitute the most suspicious evidence against him.
-
One cannot be a good historian of the outward, visible world without giving some thought to the hidden, private life of ordinary people; and on the other hand one cannot be a good historian of this inner life without taking into account outward events where these are relevant.
-
The quantity of civilization is measured by the quality of imagination.
-
She worked in order to live, and presently fell in love, also in order to live, for the heart, too, has its hunger.
-
Nothing awakens reminiscence like an aroma.