Victor Hugo Quotes

452 Sourced Quotes

An ant weighs upon the earth; a star can well weigh upon the universe.

Victor Hugo
Nature eludes calculation. Number is a grim pullulation. Nature is the thing that cannot be numbered.

Victor Hugo
The peasants of the Asturias believe that in every litter of wolves there is one pup that is killed by the mother for fear that on growing up it would devour the other little ones.

Victor Hugo
The aim of art is almost divine: to bring to life again if it is writing history, to create if it is writing poetry.

Victor Hugo
Nature, like a kind and smiling mother, lends herself to our dreams and cherishes our fancies.

Victor Hugo
Love, thine is the future. Death, I use thee, but I hate thee. Citizens, there shall be in the future neither darkness nor thunderbolts; neither ferocious ignorance nor blood for blood.

Victor Hugo
What dangers you run, O noble souls! Often, you give your heart, but we take only your body. Your heart is left to you and you look at it in the shadows and shudder.

Victor Hugo
Grasping your head between your hands, you strive to see and to know. You are at the window opening into the unknown. On all sides the deep layers of effects and causes, heaped one behind the other, wrap you with mist.

Victor Hugo
It is the peculiarity of grief to bring out the childish side of man.

Victor Hugo
The paradise of the rich is made out of the hell of the poor.

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

Victor Hugo
During a wise man's whole life, his destiny holds his philosophy in a state of siege.

Victor Hugo
Symmetry is ennui, and ennui is the very essence of grief and melancholy. Despair yawns.

Victor Hugo
Great edifices, like great mountains, are the work of ages.

Victor Hugo
Man is not a circle with a single centre; he is an ellipse with two foci. Facts are one, ideas are the other.

Victor Hugo
It is sad to tell, but after having tried society, which had caused his misfortune, he tried Providence which created society, and condemned it also.

Victor Hugo
People generally will soon understand that writers should be judged, not according to rules and species, which are contrary to nature and art, but according to the immutable principles of the art of composition, and the special laws of their individual temperaments.

Victor Hugo
The sunshine was delightful, the foliage gently astir, more from the activity of birds than from the breeze. One gallant little bird, doubtless lovelorn, was singing his heart out at the top of a tall tree.

Victor Hugo
Idleness is a mother. She has a son, robbery, and a daughter, hunger.

Victor Hugo
Science is ignorant, and has no right to laugh: a savant who laughs at the possible, is very near being an idiot.

Victor Hugo
The transept belfry and the two towers were to him three great cages, the birds in which, taught by him, would sing for him alone. Yet it was these same bells which had made him deaf; but mothers are often fondest of the child who has made them suffer most.

Victor Hugo
Algebra is applied to the clouds, the irradiation of the planet benefits the rose, and no thinker would dare to say that the perfume of the hawthorn is useless to the constellation.

Victor Hugo
Strong and rare natures are thus created; misery, almost always a stepmother, is sometimes a mother; privation gives birth to power of soul and mind; distress is the nurse of self-respect; misfortune is a good breast for great souls.

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
It may be remarked in passing that success is an ugly thing. Men are deceived by its false resemblences to merit.

Victor Hugo
There is a spectacle more grand than the sea; it is heaven; there is a spectacle more grand than heaven; it is the conscience.

Victor Hugo
One must fill oneself with human science. Above all and in spite of all, be a man. Do not fear to surcharge yourself with humanity. Ballast your mind with reality and then throw yourself into the sea — the sea of inspiration.

Victor Hugo
Nothing is more disturbing to the mind than the contemplation of the diffusion of forces at work in the unfathomable and illimitable space of the ocean.

Victor Hugo
Wide horizons lead the soul to broad ideas; circumscribed horizons engender narrow ideas; this sometimes condemns great hearts to become small minded.Broad ideas hated by narrow ideas,-this is the very struggle of progress.

Victor Hugo
To rove about, musing, that is to say loitering, is, for a philosopher, a good way of spending time, especially in that kind of mock rurality, ugly but odd, and partaking of two natures, which surrounds certain large cities, particularly Paris.

Victor Hugo