Famous Quotes

Quotes by Victor Hugo

• Indigestion is charged by God with enforcing morality on the stomach.
• Intelligence is the wife, imagination is the mistress, memory is the servant.
• Jesus wept Voltaire smiled. From that divine tear and from that human smile is derived the grace of present civilization.
• Joy's smile is much closer to tears than laughter.
• Life is the flower for which love is the honey.
• Life's greatest happiness is to be convinced we are loved.
• Love is a portion of the soul itself, and it is of the same nature as the celestial breathing of the atmosphere of paradise.
• Many great actions are committed in small struggles.
• Men become accustomed to poison by degrees.
• Men like me are impossible until the day when they become necessary.
• Music expresses that which cannot be said and on which it is impossible to be silent.
• Nature has made a pebble and a female. The lapidary makes the diamond, and the lover makes the woman.
• Nothing else in the world... not all the armies... is so powerful as an idea whose time has come.
• One is not idle because one is absorbed. There is both visible and invisible labor. To contemplate is to toil, to think is to do. The crossed arms work, the clasped hands act. The eyes upturned to Heaven are an act of creation.
• Our life dreams the Utopia. Our death achieves the Ideal.
• Peace is the virtue of civilization. War is its crime.
• People do not lack strength they lack will.
• Religions do a useful thing: they narrow God to the limits of man. Philosophy replies by doing a necessary thing: it elevates man to the plane of God.
• Rhyme, that enslaved queen, that supreme charm of our poetry, that creator of our meter.
• Scepticism, that dry caries of the intelligence.
• Short as life is, we make it still shorter by the careless waste of time.
• Smallness in a great man seems smaller by its disproportion with all the rest.
• Society is a republic. When an individual tries to lift themselves above others, they are dragged down by the mass, either by ridicule or slander.
• Sorrow is a fruit. God does not make it grow on limbs too weak to bear it.
• The drama is complete poetry. The ode and the epic contain it only in germ it contains both of them in a state of high development, and epitomizes both.
• The first symptom of love in a young man is timidity in a girl boldness.
• The greatest happiness of life is the conviction that we are loved loved for ourselves, or rather, loved in spite of ourselves.
• The ideal and the beautiful are identical the ideal corresponds to the idea, and beauty to form hence idea and substance are cognate.
• The mountains, the forest, and the sea, render men savage they develop the fierce, but yet do not destroy the human.
• The supreme happiness of life is the conviction that we are loved loved for ourselves, or rather in spite of ourselves.
• 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.
• The word is the Verb, and the Verb is God.
• There are fathers who do not love their children there is no grandfather who does not adore his grandson.
• There have been in this century only one great man and one great thing: Napoleon and liberty. For want of the great man, let us have the great thing.
• There is nothing like a dream to create the future.
• There is one thing stronger than all the armies in the world, and that is an idea whose time as come.
• To be perfectly happy it does not suffice to possess happiness, it is necessary to have deserved it.
• To give thanks in solitude is enough. Thanksgiving has wings and goes where it must go. Your prayer knows much more about it than you do.
• To love another person is to see the face of God.
• To love beauty is to see light.