Victor Hugo Quotes
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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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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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Initiative is doing the right thing without being told.
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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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Love is jealous, and ingenious in self-torture in proportion as it is pure and intense.
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Pain is as diverse as man. One suffers as one can.
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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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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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Nature has made a pebble and a female. The lapidary makes the diamond, and the lover makes the woman.
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To think of shadows is a serious thing.
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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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God has bestowed two gifts on man: hope and ignorance. Ignorance is the better of the two.
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It is by suffering that human beings become angels.
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A great artist is a great man in a great child.
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Separated lovers cheat absence by a thousand fancies which have their own reality. They are prevented from seeing one another and they cannot write; nevertheless they find countless mysterious ways of corresponding, by sending each other the song of birds, the scent of flowers, the laughter of children.
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Taste is the common sense of genius.
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Good actions are the invisible hinges on the doors of heaven.
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Puns are the droppings of soaring wits.
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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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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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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.
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What would be ugly in a garden constitutes beauty in a mountain.
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Indigestion is charged by God with enforcing morality on the stomach.