Victor Hugo Quotes
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Intelligence is the wife, imagination is the mistress, memory is the servant.
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Strong and bitter words indicate a weak cause.
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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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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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To contemplate is to look at shadows.
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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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A compliment is something like a kiss through a veil.
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Fashions have done more harm than revolutions.
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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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The beautiful has but one type, the ugly has a thousand.
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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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The world is the expanding Greece and Greece is the shrinking world.
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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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It is most pleasant to commit a just action which is disagreeable to someone whom one does not like.
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One believes others will do what he will do to himself.
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An intelligent hell would be better than a stupid paradise.
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Genius: the superhuman in man.
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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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The wicked envy and hate; it is their way of admiring.
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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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A faith is a necessity to a man. Woe to him who believes in nothing.
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Never had the sky been more studded with stars and more charming, the trees more trembling, the odor of the grass more penetrating; never had the birds fallen asleep among the leaves with a sweeter noise; never had all the harmonies of universal serenity responded more thoroughly to the inward music of love; never had Marius been more captivated, more happy, more ecstatic.
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In the opera we call love, the libretto is almost nothing.