Victor Hugo Quotes
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If I speak, I am condemned. If I stay silent, I am damned!
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A woman's best qualities are harmful if undiluted with prudence.
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Gutenberg's invention of printing is the greatest event-the mother of revolution.
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These are dark radiances. They have no suspicion that they are to be pitied. Certainly they are so. He who does not weep does not see. They are to be admired and pitied, as one would both pity and admire a being at once night and day, without eyes beneath his lashes but with a star on his brow.
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Idleness is a mother. She has a son, robbery, and a daughter, hunger.
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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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It is an unpleasant thing to go to bed without supper, it is a still less pleasant thing not to sup and not to know where one is to sleep.
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Every man is a book in which God himself writes.
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But alas, if I have not maintained my victory, it is God's fault for not making man and the devil of equal strength.
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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.
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This book should be read as one would read the book of a dead man.
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The real, native South Seas food is lousy. You can't eat it.
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To err is human. To loaf is Parisian.
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Happiness lies for those who cry, those who hurt, those who have searched, and those who have tried for only they can appreciate the importance of people who have touched their lives.
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God secludes Himself; but the thinker listens at the door.
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To be a saint is the exception; to be a just person is the rule. Err, stumble, commit sin, but be one of the just.
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To know how to distinguish the agitation arising from covetousness, from the agitation arising from principles, to fight the one and aid the other, in this lies the genius and the power of great revolutionary leaders.
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Human intelligence discovered a way of perpetuating itself, one not only more durable and more resistant than architecture, but also simpler and easier. Architecture was dethroned. The stone letters of Orpheus gave way to the lead letters of Gutenburg. The book will kill the edifice.
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Revolutions spring not from accident, but from necessity. A revolution is a return from the factitious to the real. It takes place because it must.
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There are moments when a rope's end, a pole, the branch of the tree, is life itself, and it is a frightful thing to see a living being lose his hold upon it, and fall like a ripe fruit.
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Houses are like the human beings that inhabit them.
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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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Knowledge is a weight added to conscience.
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It is God who makes woman beautiful, it is the devil who makes her pretty.