Victor Hugo Quotes

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Creation lives, grows, and multiplies: man is but a witness.

Victor Hugo
A benevolent malefactor, merciful, gentle, helpful, clement, a convict, returning good for evil, giving back pardon for hatred, preferring pity to vengeance, preferring to ruin himself rather than to ruin his enemy, saving him who had smitten him, kneeling on the heights of virtue, more nearly akin to an angel than to a man. Javert was constrained to admit to himself that this monster existed. Things could not go on in this manner.

Victor Hugo
All who suffer are full of hatred; all who live drag a remorse: the dead alone have broken their chains.

Victor Hugo
The greatest products of architecture are less the works of individuals than of society; rather the offspring of a nation's effort, than the inspired flash of a man of genius...

Victor Hugo
I am not in the world to care for my life, but for souls.

Victor Hugo
So a voice in the mountain is enough to let loose an avalanche. A word too much may be followed by a caving in. If the word had not been spoken, it would not have happened.

Victor Hugo
He sleeps. Although his fate was very strange, he lived. He died when he had no longer his angel. The thing came to pass simply, of itself, as the night comes when day is gone.

Victor Hugo
A doctor's door should never be closed, a priest's door should always be open.

Victor Hugo
The beginning as well as the end of all his thoughts was hatred of human law, that hatred which, if it be not checked in its growth by some providential event, becomes, in a certain time, hatred of society, then hatred of the human race, and then hatred of creation, and reveals itself by a vague and incessant desire to injure some living being, it matters not who.

Victor Hugo
A little girl without a doll is almost as unhappy, and quite as impossible, as a woman without children." from chapter VIII of Les Miserables

Victor Hugo
That is to be two and to be but one. A man and a woman mingled into one angel. It is heaven.

Victor Hugo
Where the telescope ends, the microscope begins. Which of the two has the grander view?

Victor Hugo
Nothing can be sadder or more profound than to see a thousand things for the first and last time.

Victor Hugo
What's our baggage? Only vows,
Happiness, and all our care,
And the flower that sweetly shows
Nestling lightly in your hair.

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

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
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
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