Victor Hugo Quotes

451 Sourced Quotes

Arithmetic, like the sea, is an undulation without any possible end.

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

Victor Hugo
My misfortune is that I still resemble a man too much. I should liked to be wholly a beast like that goat. - Quasimodo

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
There comes an hour when protest no longer suffices; after philosophy there must be action; the strong hand finishes what the idea has sketched.

Victor Hugo
I only take a half share in the civil war; I am willing to die, I am not willing to kill.

Victor Hugo
Indigestion is charged by God with enforcing morality on the stomach.

Victor Hugo
Social prosperity means man happy, the citizen free, the nation great.

Victor Hugo
This is the battle between day and night... I see black light.

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

Victor Hugo
The greatest blunders, like the thickest ropes, are often compounded of a multitude of strands. Take the rope apart, separate it into the small threads that compose it, and you can break them one by one. You think, That is all there was! But twist them all together and you have something tremendous.

Victor Hugo
The convent, which belongs to the West as it does to the East, to antiquity as it does to the present time, to Buddhism and Muhammadanism as it does to Christianity, is one of the optical devices whereby man gains a glimpse of infinity.

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
To rescue from oblivion even a fragment of a language which men have used and which is in danger of being lost - that is to say, one of the elements, whether good or bad, which have shaped and complicated civilization - is to extend the scope of social observation and to serve civilization.

Victor Hugo
Did a voice whisper in his ear that he had just passed through the decisive hour of his destiny, that there was no longer a middle course for him, that if, thereafter, he should not be the best of men, he would be the worst?

Victor Hugo
That men saw his mask, but the bishop saw his face. That men saw his life, but the bishop saw his conscience.

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

Victor Hugo
The straight line, a respectable optical illusion which ruins many a man.

Victor Hugo
Sometimes he used a spade in his garden, and sometimes he read and wrote. He had but one name for these two kinds of labor; he called them gardening. 'The Spirit is a garden,' said he

Victor Hugo
Thus, during those nineteen years of torture and slavery, did this soul rise and fall at the same time. Light entered on the one side, and darkness on the other.

Victor Hugo
Jean Prouvaire was timid only in repose. Once excited, he burst forth, a sort of mirth accentuated his enthusiasm, and he was at once both laughing and lyric.

Victor Hugo
Everything falls and is effaced. A few feet under the ground reigns so profound a silence, and yet, so much tumult on the surface!

Victor Hugo
These two halves of God, the Pope and the emperor.

Victor Hugo
There are thoughts which are prayers. There are moments when, whatever the posture of the body, the soul is on its knees.

Victor Hugo
Marius and Cosette did not ask where this would lead them. They looked at themselves as arrived. It is a strange pretension for men to ask that love should lead them somewhere.

Victor Hugo