Victor Hugo Quotes
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They say love is blindness of heart; I say not to love is blindness.
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Not being heard is no reason for silence.
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People weighed down with troubles do not look back; they know only too well that misfortune stalks them.
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Que l'avenir soit un orient au lieu d'être un couchant, c'est la consolation de l'homme.
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So a voice in the mountain is enough to let loose an avalanche. A word too much may be followed by a caving in. If the word had not been spoken, it would not have happened.
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People generally will soon understand that writers should be judged, not according to rules and species, which are contrary to nature and art, but according to the immutable principles of the art of composition, and the special laws of their individual temperaments.
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A bird sings, a child prattles, but it is the same hymn; hymn indistinct, inarticulate, but full of profound meaning.
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Beauty is as useful as the useful. More so, perhaps. (Le beau est aussi utile que l'utile. Plus peut-etre.)
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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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A language does not become fixed. The human intellect is always on the march, or, if you prefer, in movement, and languages with it.
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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.
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We are not loved by our friends for what we are; rather, we are loved in spite of what we are.
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If I speak, I am condemned. If I stay silent, I am damned!
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It may be remarked in passing that success is an ugly thing. Men are deceived by its false resemblences to merit.
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Reason is intelligence taking exercise. Imagination is intelligence with an erection.
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Large, heavy, ragged black clouds hung like crape hammocks beneath the starry cope of the night. You would have said that they were the cobwebs of the firmament.
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I didn't believe it could be so monstrous. It's wrong to be so absorbed in divine law as not to perceive human law. Death belongs to God alone. By what right do men tough that unknown thing?
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The man is placed where the Earth ends, the woman, where the heaven starts.
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His universal compassion was due less to natural instinct, than to a profound conviction, a sum of thoughts that in the course of living had filtered through to his heart: for in the nature of man, as in rock, there may be channels hollowed by the dropping of water, and these can never be destroyed.
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Mothers arms are made of tenderness, And sweet sleep blesses the child who lies therein.
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The beginning as well as the end of all his thoughts was hatred of human law, that hatred which, if it be not checked in its growth by some providential event, becomes, in a certain time, hatred of society, then hatred of the human race, and then hatred of creation, and reveals itself by a vague and incessant desire to injure some living being, it matters not who.
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Not seeing people allows you to think of them as perfect in all kinds of ways.
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God blesses man, not for having found but for having sought.
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The jostling of young minds against each other has this wonderful attribute, that one can never foresee the spark, nor predict the flash. What will spring up in a moment? Nobody knows.