Victor Hugo Quotes

452 Sourced Quotes

You say, "Where goest Thou?" I cannot tell, And still go on. But if the way be straight I cannot go amiss: before me lies Dawn and the day: the night behind me: that Suffices me: I break the bounds: I see, And nothing more; believe and nothing less. My future is not one of my concerns.

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
Each of our passions, even love, has a stomach that must not be overloaded. We must in everything write the word 'finis' in time; we must restrain ourselves, when it becomes urgent; we must draw the bolt on the appetite, play a fantasia on the violin, then break the strings with our own hand. The Wise man is he who knows when and how to stop.

Victor Hugo
His whole life was now summed up in two words: absolute uncertainty within an impenetrable fog.

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
Scientists have searched for a perpetuum mobile; they have found it: it is science itself.

Victor Hugo
When, like an Emir of tyrannic power,
Sirius appears, and on the horizon black
Bids countless stars pursue their mighty track.

Victor Hugo
Dry happiness is like dry bread. We eat, but we do not dine. I wish for the superfluous, for the useless, for the extravagant, for the too much, for that which is not good for anything.

Victor Hugo
A bird sings, a child prattles, but it is the same hymn; hymn indistinct, inarticulate, but full of profound meaning.

Victor Hugo
A tempest ceases, a cyclone passes over, a wind dies down, a broken mast can be replaced, a leak can be stopped, a fire extinguished, but what will become of this enormous brute of bronze?

Victor Hugo
A man may be a fine genius, and yet understand nothing of an art which he has not studied.

Victor Hugo
The unexpected ought always to be expected by Science. Her duty is to stop it in its course and search it, rejecting the chimerical, establishing the real.

Victor Hugo
Work, which makes a man free, and thought, which makes him worthy of freedom.

Victor Hugo
Who can calculate the passage of a particle?

Victor Hugo
An idea is a meteor; at the moment of success, the accumulated meditations which have preceded it open a little, and a spark flashes forth from it....

Victor Hugo
In disorder there can be no fecundation. Chaos is a celibate.

Victor Hugo
The mission of Science is to study and sound everything.

Victor Hugo
Arithmetic, like the sea, is an undulation without any possible end.

Victor Hugo
In Science, all tends to stir, to change, to form fresh surfaces. All denies, destroys, creates, replaces all. What was ground yesterday is put into the hopper again today. The colossal machine, Science, never rests. It is never satisfied; it is insatiable for improvement, of which the absolute knows nothing.

Victor Hugo
To live a life which is a perpetual falsehood is to suffer unknown tortures.

Victor Hugo
For true poetry, complete poetry, consists in the harmony of contraries. Hence, it is time to say aloud--and it is here above allthat exceptions prove the rule--that everything that exists in nature exists in art.

Victor Hugo
Primitive times are lyrical, ancient times epical, modern times dramatic. The ode sings of eternity, the epic imparts solemnity tohistory, the drama depicts life. The characteristic of the first poetry is ingeniousness, of the second, simplicity, of the third, truth.

Victor Hugo
He who is not master of his own thoughts is not accountable for his 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
To see so much misery everywhere, I suspect that God is not rich. He keeps up appearances, it is true, but I feel the pinch. He gives a revolution as a merchant, whose credit is low, gives a ball.

Victor Hugo
Work is the law of life, and to reject it as boredom is to submit to it as torment.

Victor Hugo
God in his harmony has equal ends
For cedar that resists and reed that bends;
For good it is a woman sometimes rules,
Holds in her hand the power, and manners, schools,
And laws, and mind; succeeding master proud,
With gentle voice and smiles she leads the crowd,
The somber human troop.

Victor Hugo
An astronomer is a sort of police constable of the heavens. The observatory is but a sentry box.

Victor Hugo
Do not economize on the hymeneal rites; do not prune them of their splendor, nor split farthings on the day when you are radiant. A wedding is not house-keeping.

Victor Hugo
The earlier works of a man of genius are always preferred to the newer ones, in order to prove that he is going down instead of up.

Victor Hugo