Victor Hugo Quotes
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The animal is ignorant of the fact that he knows. The man is aware of the fact that he is ignorant.
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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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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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Fashions have done more harm than revolutions.
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Style is the substance of the subject called unceasingly to the surface.
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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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Intelligence is the wife, imagination is the mistress, memory is the servant.
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Our acts make or mar us, we are the children of our own deeds.
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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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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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Joy's smile is much closer to tears than laughter.
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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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Taste is the common sense of genius.
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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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Civil war? What does that mean? Is there any foreign war? Isn't every war fought between men, between brothers?
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A compliment is something like a kiss through a veil.
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In the relations of man with the animals, with the flowers, with all the objects of creation, there is a whole great ethic, scarcely perceived as yet, which will at length break through into the light, and which will be the corollary and the complement to human ethics.
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Forty is the old age of youth; fifty the youth of old age.
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It is by suffering that human beings become angels.
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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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Do not forget, do not ever forget, that you have promised me to use the money to make yourself an honest man.' Valjean, who did not recall having made any promise, was silent. The bishop had spoken the words slowly and deliberately. He concluded with a solemn emphasis: Jean Valjean, my brother, you no longer belong to what is evil but to what is good. I have bought your soul to save it from black thoughts and the spirit of perdition, and I give it to God.
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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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Have courage for the great sorrows of life and patience for the small ones; and when you have laboriously accomplished your daily task, go to sleep in peace.
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Common sense is in spite of, not as the result of education.