Victor Hugo Quotes
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He who is not capable of enduring poverty is not capable of being free.
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My tastes are aristocratic, my actions democratic.
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All the forces in the world are not so powerful as an idea whose time has come.
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Toleration is the best religion.
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Scepticism, that dry caries of the intelligence.
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Verse in itself does not constitute poetry. Verse is only an elegant vestment for a beautiful form. Poetry can express itself in prose, but it does so more perfectly under the grace and majesty of verse. It is poetry of soul that inspires noble sentiments and noble actions as well as noble writings.
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Wherever the Turkish hoof trods, no grass grows.
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The last resort of kings, the cannonball. The last resort of the people, the paving stone.
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Good actions are the invisible hinges on the doors of heaven.
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Nothing can be more depressing than to expose, naked to the light of thought, the hideous growth of argot. Indeed it is like a sort of repellent animal intended to dwell in darkness which has been dragged out of its cloaca. One seems to see a horned and living creature viciously struggling to be restored to the place where it belongs. One word is like a claw, another like a sightless and bleeding eye; and there are phrases which clutch like the pincers of a crab. And all of it is alive with the hideous vitality of things that have organized themselves amid disorganization.
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Mankind is not a circle with a single center but an ellipse with two focal points of which facts are one and ideas the other.
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Short as life is, we make it still shorter by the careless waste of time.
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The soul has illusions as the bird has wings: it is supported by them.
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What would be ugly in a garden constitutes beauty in a mountain.
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My childhood began, as everybody's childhood begins, with prejudices. Man finds prejudices beside his cradle, puts them from him a little in the course of his career, and often, alas! takes to them again in his old age.
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Reaction - a boat which is going against the current but which does not prevent the river from flowing on.
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Indigestion is charged by God with enforcing morality on the stomach.
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The world is the expanding Greece and Greece is the shrinking world.
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He, who every morning plans the transactions of the day, and follows that plan, carries a thread that will guide him through a labyrinth of the most busy life.
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Certain thoughts are prayers. There are moments when, whatever be the attitude of the body, the soul is on its knees.
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Il y a maintenant en France dans chaque village un flambeau allumé, le maître d'école, et une bouche qui souffle dessus, le curé.
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I am an intelligent river which has reflected successively all the banks before which it has flowed by meditating only on the images offered by those changing shores.
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When dictatorship is a fact, revolution becomes a right.
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A great artist is a great man in a great child.