Quotes By Victor Hugo

What would be ugly in a garden constitutes beauty in a mountain.

Sorrow is a fruit. God does not make it grow on limbs too weak to bear it.

No one knows like a woman how to say things which are at once gentle and deep.

As the purse is emptied, the heart is filled.

Well, for us, in history where goodness is a rare pearl, he who was good almost takes precedence over he who was great.

Initiative is doing the right thing without being told.

Genius is a promontory jutting out into the infinite.

Common sense is in spite of, not as the result of education.

To learn to read is to light a fire; every syllable that is spelled out is a spark.

Doing nothing is happiness for children and misery for old men.

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.

Despotism is a long crime.

To love beauty is to see light.

Style is the substance of the subject called unceasingly to the surface.

Civil war? What does that mean? Is there any foreign war? Isn't every war fought between men, between brothers?

The wicked envy and hate; it is their way of admiring.

Greater than the tread of mighty armies is an idea whose time has come.

I am an intelligent river which has reflected successively all the banks before which it has flowed by meditating only on the images offered by those changing shores.

Whenever a man's friends begin to compliment him about looking young, he may be sure that they think he is growing old.

One sometimes says: 'He killed himself because he was bored with life.' One ought rather to say: 'He killed himself because he was bored by lack of life.'

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.

Strange to say, the luminous world is the invisible world; the luminous world is that which we do not see. Our eyes of flesh see only night.

When dictatorship is a fact, revolution becomes a right.

Intelligence is the wife, imagination is the mistress, memory is the servant.

To think of shadows is a serious thing.

Puns are the droppings of soaring wits.

He who is not capable of enduring poverty is not capable of being free.

Fashions have done more harm than revolutions.

No one can keep a secret better than a child.

As a means of contrast with the sublime, the grotesque is, in our view, the richest source that nature can offer.