Victor Hugo Quotes
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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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Intelligence is the wife, imagination is the mistress, memory is the servant.
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Initiative is doing the right thing without being told.
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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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Pain is as diverse as man. One suffers as one can.
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To think of shadows is a serious thing.
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Style is the substance of the subject called unceasingly to the surface.
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I will be Chateaubriand or nothing.
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To contemplate is to look at shadows.
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The world is the expanding Greece and Greece is the shrinking world.
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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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Nature has made a pebble and a female. The lapidary makes the diamond, and the lover makes the woman.
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Puns are the droppings of soaring wits.
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What would be ugly in a garden constitutes beauty in a mountain.
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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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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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The nearer I approach the end, the plainer I hear around me the immortal symphonies of the worlds which invite me. It is marvelous, yet simple.
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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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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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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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An intelligent hell would be better than a stupid paradise.
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Smallness in a great man seems smaller by its disproportion with all the rest.
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Be like the bird who, pausing in her flight awhile on boughs too slight, feels them give way beneath her, and yet sings, knowing she hath wings.
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The beautiful has but one type, the ugly has a thousand.