Victor Hugo Quotes
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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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To think of shadows is a serious thing.
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The soul has illusions as the bird has wings: it is supported by them.
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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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What would be ugly in a garden constitutes beauty in a mountain.
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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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In the opera we call love, the libretto is almost nothing.
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Wherever the Turkish hoof trods, no grass grows.
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I will be Chateaubriand or nothing.
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Liberation is not deliverance.
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In this world, which is so plainly the antechamber of another, there are no happy men. The true division of humanity is between those who live in light and those who live in darkness. Our aim must be to diminish the number of the latter and increase the number of the former. That is why we demand education and knowledge.
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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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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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It is often necessary to know how to obey a woman in order sometimes to have the right to command her.
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Initiative is doing the right thing without being told.
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A great artist is a great man in a great child.
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Love is jealous, and ingenious in self-torture in proportion as it is pure and intense.
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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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Strong and bitter words indicate a weak cause.
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Never laugh at those who suffer; suffer sometimes those who laugh.
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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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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.