Victor Hugo - Man Quotes

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Look not at the face, young girl, look at the heart. The heart of a handsome young man is often deformed. There are hearts in which love does not keep. Young girl, the pine is not beautiful; it is not beautiful like the poplar, but it keeps its foliage in winter.

Victor Hugo
A man trying to escape never thinks himself sufficiently concealed.

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
You have enemies? Why, it is the story of every man who has done a great deed or created a new idea. It is the cloud which thunders around everything that shines. Fame must have enemies, as light must have gnats. Do not bother yourself about it; disdain. Keep your mind serene as you keep your life clear.

Victor Hugo
His universal compassion was due less to natural instinct, than to a profound conviction, a sum of thoughts that in the course of living had filtered through to his heart: for in the nature of man, as in rock, there may be channels hollowed by the dropping of water, and these can never be destroyed.

Victor Hugo
The onward march of the human race requires that the heights around it constantly blaze with noble lessons of courage. Deeds of daring dazzle history and form one of man's guiding lights.

Victor Hugo
A man may be a fine genius, and yet understand nothing of an art which he has not studied.

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
Whether we be Italians or Frenchmen, misery concerns us all. Ever since history has been written, ever since philosophy has meditated, misery has been the garment of the human race; the moment has at length arrived for tearing off that rag, and for replacing, upon the naked limbs of the Man-People, the sinister fragment of the past with the grand purple robe of the dawn.

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

Victor Hugo
God put in man thought; society, action; Nature, revery.

Victor Hugo
It is the peculiarity of grief to bring out the childish side of man.

Victor Hugo
It is grievous for a man to leave behind him a shadow in his own shape.

Victor Hugo
The three great problems of this century; the degradation of man in the proletariat, the subjection of women through hunger, the atrophy of the child by darkness.

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

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
Let us leave to the brain what belongs to it, and agree that the work of the men of genius is of the superhuman, the offspring of man.

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
Monsieur' to a convict is a glass of water to a man dying of thirst at sea; ignominy thirsts for respect.

Victor Hugo
It is man's consolation that the future is to be a sunrise instead of a sunset.

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
God became a man, granted. The devil became a woman.

Victor Hugo
Anger may be foolish and absurd, and one may be wrongly irritated, but a man never feels outraged unless in some respect he is fundamentally right.

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

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
A faith is a necessity to man. Woe to him who believes nothing.

Victor Hugo
The poor man shuddered, overflowed with an angelic joy; he declared in his transport that this would last through life; he said to himself that he really had not suffered enough to deserve such radiant happiness, and he thanked God, in the depths of his soul, for having permitted that he, a miserable man, should be so loved by this innocent being.

Victor Hugo
God manifests himself to us in the first degree through the life of the universe, and in the second degree through the thought of man. The second manifestation is not less holy than the first. The first is named Nature, the second is named Art.

Victor Hugo
And, moreover, when it happens that both are sincere and good, nothing will mix and amalgamate more easily than an old priest and an old soldier. In reality, they are the same kind of man. One has devoted himself to country upon earth, the other to his country in heaven; there is no other difference.

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

Victor Hugo