Quotes By Victor Hugo

No one ever keeps a secret so well as a child.

When God desires to destroy a thing, he entrusts its destruction to the thing itself. Every bad institution of this world ends by suicide.

The brutalities of progress are called revolutions. When they are over we realize this: that the human race has been roughly handled, but that it has advanced.

Concision in style, precision in thought, decision in life.

Evil. Mistrust those who rejoice at it even more than those who do it.

Toleration is the best religion.

Prayer is an august avowal of ignorance.

To be perfectly happy it does not suffice to possess happiness, it is necessary to have deserved it.

The human soul has still greater need of the ideal than of the real. It is by the real that we exist; it is by the ideal that we live.

Love is a portion of the soul itself, and it is of the same nature as the celestial breathing of the atmosphere of paradise.

Because one doesn't like the way things are is no reason to be unjust towards God.

It is often necessary to know how to obey a woman in order sometimes to have the right to command her.

Men become accustomed to poison by degrees.

Our acts make or mar us, we are the children of our own deeds.

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.

The wise man does not grow old, but ripens.

Idleness is the heaviest of all oppressions.

Change your opinions, keep to your principles; change your leaves, keep intact your roots.

The ox suffers, the cart complains.

The omnipotence of evil has never resulted in anything but fruitless efforts. Our thoughts always escape from whoever tries to smother them.

The learned man knows that he is ignorant.

Architecture has recorded the great ideas of the human race. Not only every religious symbol, but every human thought has its page in that vast book.

Many great actions are committed in small struggles.

To love another person is to see the face of God.

Try as you will, you cannot annihilate that eternal relic of the human heart, love.

All the forces in the world are not so powerful as an idea whose time has come.

Smallness in a great man seems smaller by its disproportion with all the rest.

To love is to act.

When a man is out of sight, it is not too long before he is out of mind.

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.