Victor Hugo Quotes
-
Friendship exists outside our modern economy of scarcity... It's not about apportioning vanishing resources of time and energy. Friendship is a blessed relic of the ancient economy of the gift, and the time freely given to people dear to you actually creates magical abundance.
-
What was more needed by this old man who divided the leisure hours of his life, where he had so little leisure, between gardening in the daytime, and contemplation at night? Was not this narrow enclosure, with the sky for a background, enough to enable him to adore God in his most beautiful as well as in his most sublime works? Indeed, is not that all, and what more can be desired? A little garden to walk, and immensity to reflect upon. At his feet something to cultivate and gather; above his head something to study and meditate upon: a few flowers on the earth, and all the stars in the sky.
-
Love is like a tree, it grows of its own accord, it puts down deep roots into our whole being.
-
Women are more credulous than men.
-
There is but one way of refusing To-morrow, that is to die.
-
Teach the ignorant as much as you can; society is culpable in not providing a free education for all and it must answer for the night which it produces. If the soul is left in darkness sins will be committed. The guilty one is not he who commits the sin, but he who causes the darkness.
-
The word Gothic, in the sense in which it is generally employed, is wholly unsuitable, but wholly consecrated. Hence we accept it and we adopt it, like all the rest of the world, to characterize the architecture of the second half of the Middle Ages, where the ogive is the principle which succeeds the architecture of the first period, of which the semi-circle is the father.
-
A tempest ceases, a cyclone passes over, a wind dies down, a broken mast can be replaced, a leak can be stopped, a fire extinguished, but what will become of this enormous brute of bronze?
-
Idleness is a mother. She has a son, robbery, and a daughter, hunger.
-
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 smiles she leads the crowd, The somber human troop.
-
Nobody knows like a woman how to say things at the same time sweet and profound. Sweetness and depth, this is all of woman; this is all of Heaven.
-
Babylon violated diminishes Alexander; Rome enslaved diminishes Caesar; massacred Jerusalem diminishes Titus. Tyranny follows the tyrant. Woe to the man who leaves behind a shadow that bears his form.
-
No man is more unhappy than the one who is never in adversity; the greatest affliction of life is never to be afflicted.
-
We would be ashamed of our best behavior if the people knew the motives of our behaving so.
-
Revolutions are not born of chance but of necessity.
-
Mothers arms are made of tenderness, And sweet sleep blesses the child who lies therein.
-
A translation in verse . . . seems to me something absurd, impossible.
-
Love each other dearly always. There is scarcely anything else in the world but that: to love one another.
-
Daring is the price of progress. All splendid conquests are the prize of boldness, more or less.
-
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.
-
You preserve your shame but you kill your glory.
-
To die for lack of love is horrible. The asphyxia of the soul.
-
Emergencies have always been necessary to progress. It was darkness which produced the lamp. It was fog that produced the compass. It was hunger that drove us to exploration. And it took a depression to teach us the real value of a job.
-
Cheerfulness is like money well expended in charity; the more we dispense of it, the greater our possession.