Victor Hugo Quotes

452 Sourced Quotes

Does not beauty confer a benefit upon us, even by the simple fact of being beautiful?

Victor Hugo
Every fact is a logarithm; one added term ramifies it until it is thoroughly transformed. In the general aspect of things, the great lines of creation take shape and arrange themselves into groups; beneath lies the unfathomable.

Victor Hugo
Chance, if such a thing exists, is far-seeing.

Victor Hugo
Death has a way of its own of harassing victory, and it causes pestilence to follow glory. Typhus is an annex of triumph.

Victor Hugo
Cuvier, with one eye on Genesis and the other on nature, was striving to please the bigoted reaction by placing fossils in harmony with texts, and letting Moses be flattered by the Mastodons.

Victor Hugo
To gaze into the depths of the sea is, in the imagination, like beholding the vast unknown, and from its most terrible point of view. The submarine gulf is analogous to the realm of night and dreams. There also is sleep, unconsciousness, or at least apparent unconsciousness, of creation. There in the awful silence and darkness, the rude first forms of life, phantomlike, demoniacal, pursue their horrible instincts.

Victor Hugo
The water is supple because it is incompressible. It glides away from under the effort. Borne down on one side, it escapes on the other. It is thus that the water becomes a wave. The wave is its liberty.

Victor Hugo
Those who pray always are necessary to those who never pray. In our view, the whole question is in the amount of thought that is mingled with prayer.

Victor Hugo
One microscopic glittering point; then another; and another, and still another; they are scarcely perceptible, yet they are enormous. This light is a focus; this focus, a star; this star, a sun; this sun, a universe; this universe, nothing. Every number is zero in the presence of the infinite.

Victor Hugo
A library implies an act of faith which generations, still in darkness hid, sign in their night in witness of the dawn.

Victor Hugo
Wonderful nature has a double meaning, which dazzles great minds and blinds uncultivated souls. When man is ignorant, when the desert is filled with visions, the darkness of solitude is added to the darkness of intelligence; hence, in man, the possibilities of perdition

Victor Hugo
As for the bishop, the sight of the guillotine was a great shock to him, from which he recovered only slowly.

Victor Hugo
Claude - saddened, his faith in human affection shaken - threw himself with frenzied ardour into the arms of science, that sister who at least never laughs at you in derision, and who always repays you, albeit at times in somewhat light coin, for the care you have lavished on her.

Victor Hugo
These Greek capitals, black with age, and quite deeply graven in the stone, with I know not what signs peculiar to Gothic calligraphy imprinted upon their forms and upon their attitudes, as though with the purpose of revealing that it had been a hand of the Middle Ages which had inscribed them there, and especially the fatal and melancholy meaning contained in them, struck the author deeply.

Victor Hugo
No matter who you are, the thought of so much suffering and degradation must cause you to shudder at the sight of a veil or cassock, those two shrouds of human invention.

Victor Hugo
He had slipped, climbed, rolled, searched, walked, persevered, that is all. Such is the secret of all triumphs.

Victor Hugo
Science has but the right to put a visa on facts; she should verify and distinguish.

Victor Hugo
Nature has no candor. She shows herself to man with her face turned away.

Victor Hugo
It is God who makes woman beautiful, it is the devil who makes her pretty.

Victor Hugo
We shall look on crime as a disease, and its physicians shall displace the judges, its hospitals displace the Galleys. Liberty and health shall be alike. We shall pour balm and oil where we formerly applied iron and fire; evil will be treated in charity, instead of in anger. This change will be simple and sublime.

Victor Hugo
What is the cat?" he exclaimed. "It is a corrective. God, having made the mouse, said, 'I've made a blunder.' And he made the cat. The cat is the erratum of the mouse. The mouse, plus the cat, Is the revised and corrected proof of creation.

Victor Hugo
Oh, how hollow does science sound when a head full of passion strikes against it in despair!

Victor Hugo
Because of nature's unity it has been concluded that she is simple. An error.

Victor Hugo
Have but luck, and you will have the rest; be fortunate, and you will be thought great.

Victor Hugo
It is only barbarous nations who have a sudden growth after a victory

Victor Hugo
All human knowledge is but picking and culling. The circumstance that the false is mingled with the true, furnishes no excuse for rejecting the whole mass. When was the tare an excuse for refusing the corn? Hoe out the weed error, but reap the fact, and place it beside others. Science is the sheaf of facts.

Victor Hugo
To know how to distinguish the agitation arising from covetousness, from the agitation arising from principles, to fight the one and aid the other, in this lies the genius and the power of great revolutionary leaders.

Victor Hugo
God has bestowed two gifts on man: hope and ignorance. Ignorance is the better of the two.

Victor Hugo
Science seeks perpetual motion. She has found it: it is Science herself.

Victor Hugo
There is will in the thought, there is none in the dream. The dream, which is completely spontaneous, takes and keeps, even in the gigantic and the ideal, the form of our mind. Nothing springs more directly and more sincerely from the very bottom of our souls than our unreflected and indefinite aspirations towards the splendours of destiny.

Victor Hugo