Victor Hugo Quotes
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A writer is a world trapped in a person.
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The poor man shuddered, overflowed with an angelic joy; he declared in his transport that this would last through life; he said to himself that he really had not suffered enough to deserve such radiant happiness, and he thanked God, in the depths of his soul, for having permitted that he, a miserable man, should be so loved by this innocent being.
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You would have imagined her at one moment a maniac, at another a queen.
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Nothing discernible to the eye of the spirit is more brilliant or obscure than man; nothing is more formidable, complex, mysterious, and infinite. There is a prospect greater than the sea, and it is the sky; there is a prospect greater than the sky, and it is the human soul.
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Houses are like the human beings that inhabit them.
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Sire, you are looking at a plain man, and I am looking at a great man. Each of us may benefit.
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Nature is pitiless; she never withdraws her flowers, her music, her fragrance, and her sunlight from before human cruelty or suffering.
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That is to be two and to be but one. A man and a woman mingled into one angel. It is heaven.
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Not being heard is no reason for silence.
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Friend is sometimes a word devoid of meaning; enemy, never.
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To introduce a new play only six weeks after another has been banned is also a way to speak one's piece to the government. It proves that art and liberty can grow back in one night under the clumsy foot which crushes them.
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He who contemplates the depths of Paris is seized with vertigo. Nothing is more fantastic. Nothing is more tragic. Nothing is more sublime.
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I write with one hand, but I fight with both.
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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.
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A few feet under the ground reigns so profound a silence, and yet so much tumult on the surface!
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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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People do not read stupidities with impunity.
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Women are more credulous than men.
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While contemplating the bride, and eyeing the cake of soap, he muttered between his teeth: 'Tuesday. It was not Tuesday. Was it Tuesday? Perhaps it was Tuesday. Yes, it was Tuesday.' No one has ever discovered to what this monologue referred. Yes, perchance, this monologue had some connection with the last occasion on which he had dined, three days before, for it was now Friday.
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Life is a theatre set in which there are but few practicable entrances.
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A day will come when there will be no battlefields, but markets opening to commerce and minds opening to ideas.
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As for the author, he is profoundly unaware of what the classical or romantic genre might consist of.... In literature, as in allthings, there is only the good and the bad, the beautiful and the ugly, the true and the false.
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Dirt has been shrewdly termed "misplaced material.
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A saint addicted to excessive self-abnegation is a dangerous associate; he may infect you with poverty, and a stiffening of those joints which are needed for advancement-in a word, with more renunciation than you care for-and so you flee the contagion.