Victor Hugo Quotes
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You say, "Where goest Thou?" I cannot tell, And still go on. But if the way be straight I cannot go amiss: before me lies Dawn and the day: the night behind me: that Suffices me: I break the bounds: I see, And nothing more; believe and nothing less. My future is not one of my concerns.
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As a means of contrast with the sublime, the grotesque is, in our view, the richest source that nature can offer.
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My tastes are aristocratic, my actions democratic.
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He who is not capable of enduring poverty is not capable of being free.
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Short as life is, we make it still shorter by the careless waste of time.
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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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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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When dictatorship is a fact, revolution becomes a right.
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Son, brother, father, lover, friend. There is room in the heart for all the affections, as there is room in heaven for all the stars.
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To rise from error to truth is rare and beautiful.
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Toleration is the best religion.
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The most powerful symptom of love is a tenderness which becomes at times almost insupportable.
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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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There are no rules, no models; rather, there are no rules other than the general laws of Nature.
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The soul has illusions as the bird has wings: it is supported by them.
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Good actions are the invisible hinges on the doors of heaven.
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Wherever the Turkish hoof trods, no grass grows.
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No doubt it was necessary to civilize man in relation to man. That work is already advanced and is making progress every day. But man must be civilized also in relation to nature.
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Men become accustomed to poison by degrees.
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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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Indigestion is charged by God with enforcing morality on the stomach.
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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.