Victor Hugo Quotes
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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.
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Religions do a useful thing: they narrow God to the limits of man. Philosophy replies by doing a necessary thing: it elevates man to the plane of God.
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When dictatorship is a fact, revolution becomes a right.
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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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Every diminution of the liberty of the press is followed by a diminution of civilization. Wherever we see the freedom of the press interfered with, there we see the nutrition of the human family interrupted.
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Initiative is doing the right thing without being told.
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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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Wherever the Turkish hoof trods, no grass grows.
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One believes others will do what he will do to himself.
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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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Love is jealous, and ingenious in self-torture in proportion as it is pure and intense.
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There have been in this century only one great man and one great thing: Napoleon and liberty. For want of the great man, let us have the great thing.
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Liberation is not deliverance.
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Never laugh at those who suffer; suffer sometimes those who laugh.
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To contemplate is to look at shadows.
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The brutalities of progress are called revolutions. When they are over we realize this: that the human race has been roughly handled, but that it has advanced.
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To think of shadows is a serious thing.
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The beautiful has but one type, the ugly has a thousand.
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Despotism is a long crime.
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What is history? An echo of the past in the future; a reflex from the future on the past.
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Nature has made a pebble and a female. The lapidary makes the diamond, and the lover makes the woman.
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Never had the sky been more studded with stars and more charming, the trees more trembling, the odor of the grass more penetrating; never had the birds fallen asleep among the leaves with a sweeter noise; never had all the harmonies of universal serenity responded more thoroughly to the inward music of love; never had Marius been more captivated, more happy, more ecstatic.
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Pain is as diverse as man. One suffers as one can.
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I will be Chateaubriand or nothing.