Victor Hugo Quotes
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Need is a low door which, when we must by stern necessity pass through, forces the greatest to bend down the most.
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So long as ignorance and poverty exist on earth, books of the nature of Les Miserables cannot fail to be of use.
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The author creates a book and the people accept or not accept it. The creator of a book is an author and the creator of it`s fate are people.
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There is a material advancement; we desire it. There is, also, a moral grandeur; we hold fast to it.
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Nothing is really small; whoever is open to the deep penetration of nature knows this.
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In the animal world no creature born to be a dove turns into a scavenger. This happens only among men.
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Whenever we encounter the Infinite in man, however imperfectly understood, we treat it with respect. Whether in the synagogue, the mosque, the pagoda, or the wigwam, there is a hideous aspect which we execrate and a sublime aspect which we venerate. So great a subject for spiritual contemplation, such measureless dreaming - the echo of God on the human wall!
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Daring is the price of progress. All splendid conquests are the prize of boldness, more or less.
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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.
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Genuflection before the idol or the dollar destroys the muscles which walk and the will that moves.
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Melancholy is the happiness of being sad.
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There are, as we know, powerful and illustrious atheists. At bottom, led back to the truth by their very force, they are not absolutely sure that they are atheists; it is with them only a question of definition, and in any case, if they do not believe in God, being great minds, they prove God.
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Emotion is always new and the word has always served; therein lies the difficulty of expressing emotion.
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In the Twentieth Century war will be dead, the scaffold will be dead, hatred will be dead, frontier boundaries will be dead, dogmas will be dead; man will live. He will possess something higher than all these-a great country, the whole earth, and a great hope, the whole heaven.
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The saints were his friends, and blessed him; the monsters were his friends, and guarded him.
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The most beautiful of altars, he said, is the soul of an unhappy creature consoled and thankfing God.
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When, like an Emir of tyrannic power, Sirius appears, and on the horizon black Bids countless stars pursue their mighty track.
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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.
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There is no more sovereign eloquence than the truth in indignation.
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Do not ask the name of the person who seeks a bed for the night. He who is reluctant to give his name is the one who most needs shelter.
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Humanity is our common lot. All men are made of the same clay. There is no difference, at least here on Earth, in the fate assigned to us. We come of the same void, inhabit the same flesh, are dissolved in the same ashes. But ignorance infecting the human substance turns it black, and that incurable blackness, gaining possession of the soul, becomes Evil.
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Knowledge is a weight added to conscience.
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A day will come when all nations on our continent will form a European brotherhood... A day will come when we shall see... the United States of America and the United States of Europe face to face, reaching out for each other across the seas.
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I believe in religion against the religious; in the pitifulness of orisons, and in the sublimity of prayer.