Victor Hugo Quotes
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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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Style is the substance of the subject called unceasingly to the surface.
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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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Pain is as diverse as man. One suffers as one can.
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Taste is the common sense of genius.
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A library implies an act of faith.
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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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What is history? An echo of the past in the future; a reflex from the future on the past.
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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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A great artist is a great man in a great child.
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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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Nature has made a pebble and a female. The lapidary makes the diamond, and the lover makes the woman.
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You say, "Where goest Thou?" I cannot tell, And still go on. But if the way be straight I cannot go amiss: before me lies Dawn and the day: the night behind me: that Suffices me: I break the bounds: I see, And nothing more; believe and nothing less. My future is not one of my concerns.
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Intelligence is the wife, imagination is the mistress, memory is the servant.
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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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Ce besoin de l’immatériel est le plus vivace de tous. Il faut du pain; mais avant le pain, il faut l’idéal.
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Love is jealous, and ingenious in self-torture in proportion as it is pure and intense.
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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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Where no plan is laid, where the disposal of time is surrendered merely to the chance of incident, chaos will soon reign.
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Initiative is doing the right thing without being told.