Victor Hugo Quotes

452 Sourced Quotes

To live a life which is a perpetual falsehood is to suffer unknown tortures.

Victor Hugo
For true poetry, complete poetry, consists in the harmony of contraries. Hence, it is time to say aloud--and it is here above allthat exceptions prove the rule--that everything that exists in nature exists in art.

Victor Hugo
Primitive times are lyrical, ancient times epical, modern times dramatic. The ode sings of eternity, the epic imparts solemnity tohistory, the drama depicts life. The characteristic of the first poetry is ingeniousness, of the second, simplicity, of the third, truth.

Victor Hugo
He who is not master of his own thoughts is not accountable for his own deeds.

Victor Hugo
One of the hardest labours of the just man is to expunge from his soul a malevolence which it is difficult to efface.

Victor Hugo
To see so much misery everywhere, I suspect that God is not rich. He keeps up appearances, it is true, but I feel the pinch. He gives a revolution as a merchant, whose credit is low, gives a ball.

Victor Hugo
Work is the law of life, and to reject it as boredom is to submit to it as torment.

Victor Hugo
God in his harmony has equal ends
For cedar that resists and reed that bends;
For good it is a woman sometimes rules,
Holds in her hand the power, and manners, schools,
And laws, and mind; succeeding master proud,
With gentle voice and smiles she leads the crowd,
The somber human troop.

Victor Hugo
An astronomer is a sort of police constable of the heavens. The observatory is but a sentry box.

Victor Hugo
Do not economize on the hymeneal rites; do not prune them of their splendor, nor split farthings on the day when you are radiant. A wedding is not house-keeping.

Victor Hugo
The earlier works of a man of genius are always preferred to the newer ones, in order to prove that he is going down instead of up.

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

Victor Hugo
Every fact is a logarithm; one added term ramifies it until it is thoroughly transformed. In the general aspect of things, the great lines of creation take shape and arrange themselves into groups; beneath lies the unfathomable.

Victor Hugo
Chance, if such a thing exists, is far-seeing.

Victor Hugo
Death has a way of its own of harassing victory, and it causes pestilence to follow glory. Typhus is an annex of triumph.

Victor Hugo
Cuvier, with one eye on Genesis and the other on nature, was striving to please the bigoted reaction by placing fossils in harmony with texts, and letting Moses be flattered by the Mastodons.

Victor Hugo
To gaze into the depths of the sea is, in the imagination, like beholding the vast unknown, and from its most terrible point of view. The submarine gulf is analogous to the realm of night and dreams. There also is sleep, unconsciousness, or at least apparent unconsciousness, of creation. There in the awful silence and darkness, the rude first forms of life, phantomlike, demoniacal, pursue their horrible instincts.

Victor Hugo
The water is supple because it is incompressible. It glides away from under the effort. Borne down on one side, it escapes on the other. It is thus that the water becomes a wave. The wave is its liberty.

Victor Hugo
Science seeks perpetual motion. She has found it: it is Science herself.

Victor Hugo
Because of nature's unity it has been concluded that she is simple. An error.

Victor Hugo
Have but luck, and you will have the rest; be fortunate, and you will be thought great.

Victor Hugo
It is only barbarous nations who have a sudden growth after a victory

Victor Hugo
All human knowledge is but picking and culling. The circumstance that the false is mingled with the true, furnishes no excuse for rejecting the whole mass. When was the tare an excuse for refusing the corn? Hoe out the weed error, but reap the fact, and place it beside others. Science is the sheaf of facts.

Victor Hugo
To know how to distinguish the agitation arising from covetousness, from the agitation arising from principles, to fight the one and aid the other, in this lies the genius and the power of great revolutionary leaders.

Victor Hugo
God has bestowed two gifts on man: hope and ignorance. Ignorance is the better of the two.

Victor Hugo
Nature eludes calculation. Number is a grim pullulation. Nature is the thing that cannot be numbered.

Victor Hugo
Nature, like a kind and smiling mother, lends herself to our dreams and cherishes our fancies.

Victor Hugo
The aim of art is almost divine: to bring to life again if it is writing history, to create if it is writing poetry.

Victor Hugo
The peasants of the Asturias believe that in every litter of wolves there is one pup that is killed by the mother for fear that on growing up it would devour the other little ones.

Victor Hugo
Oh, how hollow does science sound when a head full of passion strikes against it in despair!

Victor Hugo