Victor Hugo Quotes

[He] had to submit to the fate of every newcomer in a small town, where many tongues talk but few heads think.
Victor Hugo
In a little town, there are many mouths which talk, and very few heads which think.
Victor Hugo
Blacheville smiles with the self-satisfied smugness of a man whose vanity is tickled
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
To breathe Paris is to preserve one's soul.
Victor Hugo
To err his human, to stroll is Parisian.
Victor Hugo
Many people in Paris are quite content to look on at others, and there are plenty who regard a wall behind which something is happening as a very curious thing.
Victor Hugo
Paris, viewed from the towers of Notre Dame in the cool dawn of a summer morning, is a delectable and a magnificent sight; and the Paris of that period must have been eminently so.
Victor Hugo
To breath the air of Paris preserves the soul.
Victor Hugo
Admirable, however, as the Paris of the present day appears to you, build up and put together again in imagination the Paris of the fifteenth century; look at the light through that surprising host of steeples, towers, and belfries; pour forth amid the immense city, break against the points of its islands, compress within the arches of the bridges, the current of the Seine, with its large patches of green and yellow, more changeable than a serpent's skin; define clearly the Gothic profile of this old Paris upon an horizon of azure, make its contour float in a wintry fog which clings to its innumerable chimneys; drown it in deep night, and observe the extraordinary play of darkness and light in this sombre labyrinth of buildings; throw into it a ray of moonlight, which shall show its faint outline and cause the huge heads of the towers to stand forth from amid the mist; or revert to that dark picture, touch up with shade the thousand acute angles of the spires and gables, and make them stand out, more jagged than a shark's jaw, upon the copper-coloured sky of evening. Now compare the two.
Victor Hugo
He who contemplates the depths of Paris is seized with vertigo.Nothing is more fantastic. Nothing is more tragic.Nothing is more sublime.
Victor Hugo
To study in Paris is to be born in Paris!
Victor Hugo
If you ask the great city, ‘Who is this person?,’ she will answer, ‘He is my child.
Victor Hugo
I wanted to see you again, touch you, know who you were, see if I would find you identical with the ideal image of you which had remained with me and perhaps shatter my dream with the aid of reality.-Claude Frollo
Victor Hugo
If the soul is left in darkness, sins will be committed. The guilty one is not he who commits the sin, but the one who causes the darkness. (Monseigneur Bienvenu in _Les Miserables_)
Victor Hugo
It is God who makes woman beautiful it is the devil who makes her pretty.
Victor Hugo
Those who live are those who fight.
Victor Hugo
The greatest happiness in life is the conviction that we are loved - loved for ourselves or rather loved in spite of ourselves.
Victor Hugo
Toleration is the best religion.
Victor Hugo
A man is not idle because he is absorbed in thought. There is a visible labour and there is an invisible labour.
Victor Hugo
Thought is the labour of the intellect reverie is its pleasure.
Victor Hugo
My tastes are aristocratic my actions democratic.
Victor Hugo
Everything bows to success even grammar.
Victor Hugo
Strong and bitter words indicate a weak cause.
Victor Hugo
Sorrow is a fruit God does not allow it to grow on a branch that is too weak to bear it.
Victor Hugo
Proverty and wealth are comparative sins.
Victor Hugo
Be like the bird that passing on her flight awhile on boughs too slight feels them give way beneath her and yet sings knowing that she hath wings.
Victor Hugo
Progress - the stride of God!
Victor Hugo
Those who always pray are necessary to those who never pray.
Victor Hugo
There are many lovely women but no perfect ones.
Victor Hugo
He who every morning plans the transactions of the day and follows out that plan carries a thread that will guide him through the labyrinth of the most busy life. ... If the disposal of time is surrendered merely to the chance of incident chaos will soon reign.
Victor Hugo
Nature like a kind and smiling mother lends herself to our dreams and cherishes our fancies.
Victor Hugo
Progress - the stride of God!
Victor Hugo
Those who always pray are necessary to those who never pray.
Victor Hugo
There are many lovely women but no perfect ones.
Victor Hugo
He who every morning plans the transactions of the day and follows out that plan carries a thread that will guide him through the labyrinth of the most busy life. ... If the disposal of time is surrendered merely to the chance of incident chaos will soon reign.
Victor Hugo
Nature like a kind and smiling mother lends herself to our dreams and cherishes our fancies.
Victor Hugo
He who every morning plans the transactions of the day and follows that plan carries thread that will guide him through the labyrinth of the most busy life.
Victor Hugo
The supreme happiness of life is the conviction that we are loved.
Victor Hugo
Life is a flower of which love is the honey.
Victor Hugo
Laughter is the sun that drives winter from the human race.
Victor Hugo
What a grand thing to be loved! What a grander thing still to lovel
Victor Hugo
Inspiration and genius - one and the same.
Victor Hugo
The nearer I approach the end the plainer I hear around me the immortal symphonies of the worlds which invite me. It is marvelous yet simple.
Victor Hugo
No army can withstand the strength of an idea whose time has come.
Victor Hugo
Hope is the word which God has written on the brow of every man.
Victor Hugo
As the purse is emptied the heart is filled.
Victor Hugo
Where no plan is laid where the disposal of time is surrendered merely to the chance of incident chaos will soon reign.
Victor Hugo
Genius is a promontory jutting out of the infinite.
Victor Hugo
There are fathers who do not love their children there is no grandfather who does not adore his grandson.
Victor Hugo
Loving is half of believing.
Victor Hugo
I had rather be hissed for a good verse than applauded for a bad one.
Victor Hugo
Sorrow is a fruit. God does not allow it to grow on a branch that is too weak to bear it.
Victor Hugo
Common sense is in spite of not the result of education.
Victor Hugo
If you would civilize a man begin with his grandmother.
Victor Hugo
As the purse is emptied the heart is filled.
Victor Hugo
Caution is the eldest child of wisdom.
Victor Hugo
Strong and bitter words indicate a weak cause.
Victor Hugo
Forty is the old age of youth fifty is the youth of old age.
Victor Hugo
Emergencies have always been necessary to progress. It was darkness which produced the lamp. It was fog that produced the compass. It was hunger that drove us to exploration. And it took a depression to teach us the real value of a job.
Victor Hugo