Victor Hugo Quotes

451 Sourced Quotes

Though we chisel away as best we can at the mysterious block from which our life is made, the black vein of destiny continually reappears.

Victor Hugo
I didn't believe it could be so monstrous. It's wrong to be so absorbed in divine law as not to perceive human law. Death belongs to God alone. By what right do men tough that unknown thing?

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
Science is continually correcting what it has said. Fertile corrections...science is a ladder...poetry is a winged flight...An artistic masterpiece exists for all time...Dante does not efface Homer.

Victor Hugo
Popularity — a piece of faded tinsel, that is out of date.

Victor Hugo
Poor mothers, he thought. There is one thing sadder than to see their children die: to see them lead evil lives.

Victor Hugo
I have been loving you a little more every minute since this morning.

Victor Hugo
Waterloo! Waterloo! Waterloo! Dismal plain!

Victor Hugo
He had, they said, tasted in succession all the apples of the tree of knowledge, and, whether from hunger or disgust, had ended by tasting the forbidden fruit.

Victor Hugo
Who can calculate the passage of a particle?

Victor Hugo
Alas! what does man here below? A little noise in much shadow.

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

Victor Hugo
The first symptom of true love in a young man is timidity; in a young girl it is boldness.

Victor Hugo
A saint addicted to excessive self-abnegation is a dangerous associate; he may infect you with poverty, and a stiffening of those joints which are needed for advancement-in a word, with more renunciation than you care for-and so you flee the contagion.

Victor Hugo
The convent is supreme egotism resulting in supreme self-denial.

Victor Hugo
Cimourdain was a pure-minded but gloomy man. He had "the absolute" within him. He had been a priest, which is a solemn thing. Man may have, like the sky, a dark and impenetrable serenity; that something should have caused night to fall in his soul is all that is required. Priesthood had been the cause of night within Cimourdain. Once a priest, always a priest.
Whatever causes night in our souls may leave stars. Cimourdain was full of virtues and truth, but they shine out of a dark background.

Victor Hugo
Every bird which flies has the thread of the infinite in its claw. Germination includes the hatching of a meteor and the tap of a swallow's bill breaking the egg, and it leads forward the birth of an earth-worm and the advent of Socrates.

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

Victor Hugo
Waterloo is a battle of the first rank won by a captain of the second.

Victor Hugo
The sadness which reigned everywhere was but an excuse for unfailing kindness.

Victor Hugo
An invasion of armies can be resisted, but not an idea whose time has come.

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

Victor Hugo
Large, heavy, ragged black clouds hung like crape hammocks beneath the starry cope of the night. You would have said that they were the cobwebs of the firmament.

Victor Hugo
A man is not idle because he is absorbed in thought. There is visible and invisible labor. To contemplate is to toil. To think is to do.

Victor Hugo