Victor Hugo Quotes
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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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How did it happen that their lips came together? How does it happen that birds sing, that snow melts, that the rose unfolds, that the dawn whitens behind the stark shapes of trees on the quivering summit of the hill? A kiss, and all was said.
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Style is the substance of the subject called unceasingly to the surface.
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Pain is as diverse as man. One suffers as one can.
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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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Nature has made a pebble and a female. The lapidary makes the diamond, and the lover makes the woman.
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Be as a bird perched on a frail branch that she feels bending beneath her, still she sings away all the same, knowing she has wings.
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Initiative is doing the right thing without being told.
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Intelligence is the wife, imagination is the mistress, memory is the servant.
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What would be ugly in a garden constitutes beauty in a mountain.
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To think of shadows is a serious thing.
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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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When a man understands the art of seeing, he can trace the spirit of an age and the features of a king even in the knocker on a door.
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Because one doesn't like the way things are is no reason to be unjust towards God.
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God has bestowed two gifts on man: hope and ignorance. Ignorance is the better of the two.
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The world is the expanding Greece and Greece is the shrinking world.
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To contemplate is to look at shadows.
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Puns are the droppings of soaring wits.
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It is by suffering that human beings become angels.
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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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In the French language, there is a great gulf between prose and poetry; in English, there is hardly any difference. It is a splendid privilege of the great literary languages Greek, Latin, and French that they possess a prose. English has not this privilege. There is no prose in English.
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There is one spectacle grander than the sea, that is the sky; there is one spectacle grander than the sky, that is the interior of the soul.
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Dear God! how beauty varies in nature and art. In a woman the flesh must be like marble; in a statue the marble must be like flesh.