Victor Hugo Quotes

451 Sourced Quotes

When God desires to destroy a thing, he entrusts its destruction to the thing itself. Every bad institution of this world ends by suicide.

Victor Hugo
The most ferocious animals are disarmed by caresses to their young.

Victor Hugo
The delight we inspire in others has this enchanting peculiarity that, far from being diminished like every other reflection, it returns to us more radiant than ever.

Victor Hugo
Philosophy is the microscope of thought. Everything desires to flee from it, but nothing escapes it.

Victor Hugo
Die, very good, but do not make others die. Suicides like the one which is about to take place here are sublime, but suicide is restricted, and does not allow of extension; and so soon as it affects your neighbors, suicide becomes murder.

Victor Hugo
Ecclesiastes names thee Almighty, the Maccabees name thee Creator, the Epistle to the Ephesians names thee Liberty, Baruch names thee Immensity, the Psalms name thee Wisdom and Truth, John names thee Light, the Book of Kings names thee Lord, Exodus names thee Providence, Leviticus Sanctity, Esdras Justice, creation names thee God, man names thee Father; but Solomon names thee Compassion, which is the most beautiful of all thy names.

Victor Hugo
There is no distress so complete but that even in the most critical moments the inexplicable sunrise of hope is seen in its depths.

Victor Hugo
If people did not love one another, I really don't see what use there would be in having any spring.

Victor Hugo
The beautiful is as useful as the useful." He added after a moment's silence, "Perhaps more so.

Victor Hugo
Idleness, pleasure, what abysses! To do nothing is a dreary course to take, be sure of it. To live idle upon the substance of society! To be useless, that is to say, noxious! This leads straight to the lowest depth of misery.

Victor Hugo
He sleeps. Although his fate was very strange, he lived. He died when he had no longer his angel. The thing came to pass simply, of itself, as the night comes when day is gone.

Victor Hugo
To rise at six, to dine at ten,
To sup at six, to sleep at ten,
Makes a man live for ten times ten.

Victor Hugo
Of what is man certain? What lasts? What passes? What is chimerical? What is real?... Every body drags its shadow, and every mind its doubt.

Victor Hugo
They had done him the honor to take him for a madman, but had set him free on discovering that he was only a poet.

Victor Hugo
Logic ignores the almost, just as the sun ignores the candle.

Victor Hugo
Our acts make or mar us; we are the children of our own deeds.

Victor Hugo
One of the hardest labours of the just man is to expunge from his soul a malevolence which it is difficult to efface.

Victor Hugo
It is an unpleasant thing to go to bed without supper, it is a still less pleasant thing not to sup and not to know where one is to sleep.

Victor Hugo
But listen, there will be more joy in heaven over the tears of a repentant sinner than over the white robes of a hundred just men.

Victor Hugo
People weighed down with troubles do not look back; they know only too well that misfortune stalks them.

Victor Hugo
Babylon violated diminishes Alexander; Rome enslaved diminishes Caesar; massacred Jerusalem diminishes Titus. Tyranny follows the tyrant. Woe to the man who leaves behind a shadow that bears his form.

Victor Hugo
To be wicked does not insure prosperity, for the inn did not succeed well.

Victor Hugo
When love has fused and mingled two beings in a sacred and angelic unity, the secret of life has been discovered so far as they are concerned; they are no longer anything more than the two boundaries of the same destiny; they are no longer anything but the two wings of the same spirit. Love, soar.

Victor Hugo
Nothing is more imminent than the impossible... what we must always foresee is the unforeseen.

Victor Hugo
It seems as though, at the approach of a certain dark hour, the light of heaven infills those who are leaving the light of earth.

Victor Hugo