Victor Hugo Quotes
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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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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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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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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.
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Love is jealous, and ingenious in self-torture in proportion as it is pure and intense.
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A great artist is a great man in a great child.
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There is nothing like a dream to create the future.
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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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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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Liberation is not deliverance.
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It is the end. But of what? The end of France? No. The end of kings? Yes.
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The world is the expanding Greece and Greece is the shrinking world.
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Despotism is a long crime.
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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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Nature has made a pebble and a female. The lapidary makes the diamond, and the lover makes the woman.
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Initiative is doing the right thing without being told.
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Architecture has recorded the great ideas of the human race. Not only every religious symbol, but every human thought has its page in that vast book.
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If you don't build castles in the air you won't build anything on the ground.
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To contemplate is to look at shadows.
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To think of shadows is a serious thing.
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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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Curiosity is one of the forms of feminine bravery.