Victor Hugo Quotes
-
There is one thing stronger than all the armies in the world, and that is an idea whose time as come.
-
My tastes are aristocratic, my actions democratic.
-
What Shakespeare was able to do in English he would certainly not have done in French.
-
Scepticism, that dry caries of the intelligence.
-
The last resort of kings, the cannonball. The last resort of the people, the paving stone.
-
Reaction - a boat which is going against the current but which does not prevent the river from flowing on.
-
All the forces in the world are not so powerful as an idea whose time has come.
-
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.
-
Good actions are the invisible hinges on the doors of heaven.
-
The soul has illusions as the bird has wings: it is supported by them.
-
Short as life is, we make it still shorter by the careless waste of time.
-
The world is the expanding Greece and Greece is the shrinking world.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
Indigestion is charged by God with enforcing morality on the stomach.
-
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.
-
A great artist is a great man in a great child.
-
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.
-
Thought is more than a right - it is the very breath of man. Whoever fetters thought attacks man himself. To speak, to write, to publish, are things, so far as the right is concerned, absolutely identical. They are the ever-enlarging circles of intelligence in action; they are the sonorous waves of thought.
-
What would be ugly in a garden constitutes beauty in a mountain.
-
Il y a maintenant en France dans chaque village un flambeau allumé, le maître d'école, et une bouche qui souffle dessus, le curé.
-
The most powerful symptom of love is a tenderness which becomes at times almost insupportable.
-
A society that admits misery, a humanity that admits war, seem to me an inferior society and a debased humanity; it is a higher society and a more elevated humanity at which I am aiming - a society without kings, a humanity without barriers.