Victor Hugo Quotes
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Indigestion is charged by God with enforcing morality on the stomach.
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What would be ugly in a garden constitutes beauty in a mountain.
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Nations, like stars, are entitled to eclipse. All is well, provided the light returns and the eclipse does not become endless night. Dawn and resurrection are synonymous. The reappearance of the light is the same as the survival of the soul.
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Smallness in a great man seems smaller by its disproportion with all the rest.
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Fashions have done more harm than revolutions.
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A compliment is something like a kiss through a veil.
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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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Strong and bitter words indicate a weak cause.
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Hell is an outrage on humanity. When you tell me that your deity made you in his image, I reply that he must have been very ugly.
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I am a soul. I know well that what I shall render up to the grave is not myself. That which is myself will go elsewhere. Earth, thou art not my abyss!
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Genius: the superhuman in man.
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To contemplate is to look at shadows.
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An intelligent hell would be better than a stupid paradise.
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Du fond de l'ombre où nous sommes et où vous êtes, vous ne voyez pas beaucoup plus distinctement que nous les radieuses et lointaines portes de l'éden. Seulement les prêtres se trompent. Ces portes saintes ne sont pas derrière nous, mais devant nous.
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The beautiful has but one type, the ugly has a thousand.
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It is most pleasant to commit a just action which is disagreeable to someone whom one does not like.
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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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The world is the expanding Greece and Greece is the shrinking world.
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One believes others will do what he will do to himself.
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A faith is a necessity to a man. Woe to him who believes in nothing.
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The wicked envy and hate; it is their way of admiring.
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There are thoughts which are prayers. There are moments when, whatever the posture of the body, the soul is on its knees.
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I love all men who think, even those who think otherwise than myself.
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The human soul has still greater need of the ideal than of the real. It is by the real that we exist; it is by the ideal that we live.