Victor Hugo Quotes

452 Sourced Quotes

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

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
For, to make deserts, God, who rules mankind, Begins with kings, and ends the work by wind.

Victor Hugo