Victor Hugo Quotes

452 Sourced Quotes

Nihilism has no substance. There is no such thing as nothingness, and zero does not exist. Everything is something. Nothing is nothing.

Victor Hugo
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.

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
Inanimate objects sometimes appear endowed with a strange power of sight. A statue notices, a tower watches, the face of an edifice contemplates.

Victor Hugo
To look facts in the face is the duty of every sensible person.

Victor Hugo
For dogs we kings should have lions, and for cats, tigers. The great benefits a crown.

Victor Hugo
Yes, instruction! Light! Light! Everything comes from light, and to everything it returns.

Victor Hugo
Indigestion was sent into the world to read a lecture to our stomachs...

Victor Hugo
Lastly, this threefold poetry flows from three great sources - The Bible, Homer, Shakespeare.... The Bible before the Iliad, the Iliad before Shakespeare.

Victor Hugo
There is suffering in the light; in excess it burns. Flame is hostile to the wing. To burn and yet to fly, this is the miracle of genius.

Victor Hugo
Paris is a sum total. Paris is the ceiling of the human race. All this prodigious city is an epitome of dead and living manners and customs. He who sees Paris, seems to see all history through with the sky and constellations in the intervals.

Victor Hugo
The repose of darkness is deeper on the water than on the land.

Victor Hugo
A queen, devoid of beauty is not queen;
She needs the royalty of beauty's mien.

Victor Hugo
Let us leave to the brain what belongs to it, and agree that the work of the men of genius is of the superhuman, the offspring of man.

Victor Hugo
She had had sweet dreams, which possibly arose from the fact that her little bed was very white.

Victor Hugo
When we are at the end of life, to die means to go away; when we are at the beginning, to go away means to die.

Victor Hugo
A man trying to escape never thinks himself sufficiently concealed.

Victor Hugo
A mathematician is a savant only on condition that he be also a sage.

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
This is no dream; it is the universal law of Nature. But how to extract from science the secret of this universal law?

Victor Hugo
God whose gifts in gracious flood
Unto all who seek are sent,
Only asks you to be good
And is content.

Victor Hugo
The supreme ordeal, let us say rather, the only ordeal, is the loss of the beloved being.

Victor Hugo
The word Gothic, in the sense in which it is generally employed, is wholly unsuitable, but wholly consecrated. Hence we accept it and we adopt it, like all the rest of the world, to characterize the architecture of the second half of the Middle Ages, where the ogive is the principle which succeeds the architecture of the first period, of which the semi-circle is the father.

Victor Hugo
A nebula is, as it were, a universe in the cocoon.

Victor Hugo
Is it not a thing divine to have a smile which, none know how, has the power to lighten the weight of that enormous chain which all the living in common drag behind them?

Victor Hugo
There are no trifles in the human story, no trifling leaves on the tree.

Victor Hugo
Phenomena may well be suspected of anything, are capable of anything. Hypothesis proclaims the infinite; that is what gives hypothesis its greatness. Beneath the surface fact it seeks the real fact. It asks creation for her thoughts, and then for her second thoughts. The great scientific discoverers are those who hold nature suspect.

Victor Hugo
All roads are blocked to a philosophy which reduces everything to the word 'no.' To 'no' there is only one answer and that is 'yes.

Victor Hugo
There are souls which, crab-like, crawl continually toward darkness, going back in life rather than advancing in it, using what experience they have to increase their deformity, growing worse without ceasing, and becoming steeped more and more thoroughly in an intensifying wickedness.

Victor Hugo
Here is the diatom, there the star. Above, just as below, specks; below, as above, vastness.

Victor Hugo