Victor Hugo Quotes
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Friend is sometimes a word devoid of meaning; enemy, never.
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Inspiration and genius -one and the same.
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Genius is rare because the means of becoming one have not been available.
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He loved books; books are cold but safe friends.
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The man is placed where the Earth ends, the woman, where the heaven starts.
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Table talk and Lovers' talk equally elude the grasp; Lovers' talk is clouds, table talk is smoke.
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Music is the vapor of art. It is to poetry what reverie is to thought, what fluid is to solid, what the ocean of clouds is to the ocean of waves.
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The onward march of the human race requires that the heights around it constantly blaze with noble lessons of courage. Deeds of daring dazzle history and form one of man's guiding lights.
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Excitement is not enjoyment: in calmness lies true pleasure. The most precious wines are sipped, not bolted at a swallow.
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Our mind is enriched by what we receive, our heart by what we give.
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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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How frightened hypocrisy hastens to defend itself.
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Sometimes he used a spade in his garden, and sometimes he read and wrote. He had but one name for these two kinds of labor; he called them gardening. ‘The Spirit is a garden,’ said he.
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These two beings, who had loved each other so exclusively, and with so touching a love, and who had lived so long for each other, were now suffering beside one another and through one another; without speaking of it, without harsh feeling, and smiling all the while.
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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.
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With a tiny bit of effort, the nettle would be useful; if you neglect it, it becomes a pest. So then we kill it. How many men are like nettles My friends, there is no such thing as a weed and no such thing as a bad man. There are only bad cultivators.
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The most terrible of motives and the most unanswerable of responses: Because.
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As for methods of prayer, all of them are good as long as they are sincere.
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I see black light (his last words).
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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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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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...But listen, there will be more joy in heaven over the tears of a repentant sinner than over the white robes of a hundred just men.
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You ask me what forces me to speak? a strange thing; my conscience.
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Night and the day, when united, Bring forth the beautiful light.