Victor Hugo Quotes

Every day has its great grief or its small anxiety. ... One cloud is dispelled, another forms. There is hardly one day in a hundred of real joy and bright sunshine.

I repeat, whether we be Italians or Frenchmen, misery concerns us all.

To study in Paris is to be born in Paris!

When grace combines with wrinkles, it is admirable. There is an indescribable light of dawn about intensely happy old age. . . . The young person is handsome, but the old, superb.

To meditate is to labour; to think is to act. Folded arms work, closed hands perform, a gaze fixed on heaven is a toil.

Marius and Cosette did not ask where this would lead them. They looked at themselves as arrived. It is a strange pretension for men to ask that love should lead them somewhere.

One believes others will do what he will do to himself.

When two souls have finally found each other, there is established between them a union which begins on earth and continues forever in heaven.

A day will come when markets, open to trade, and minds, open to ideas, will become the sole battlefield.

True thinkers are characterized by a blending of clearness and mystery.

Beauty is as useful as the useful. More so, perhaps. (Le beau est aussi utile que l'utile. Plus peut-etre.)

Diamonds are found only in the dark places of the earth, truths are found only in the depths of thought.

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

Logic ignores the almost, just as the sun ignores the candle.

Poetry contains philosophy as the soul contains reason.

They say love is blindness of heart; I say not to love is blindness.

Everything speaks: the flowing airstream and the sailing halycon, the blade of grass, the flower, the bud, the element; did you imagine the universe to be otherwise?

Work is the law of life, and to reject it as boredom is to submit to it as torment.

We would be ashamed of our best behavior if the people knew the motives of our behaving so.

Are you afraid of the good you might do?

Children at once accept joy and happiness with quick familiarity, being themselves naturally all happiness and joy.

A sewer is a cynic. It tells All.

I'd like a drink. I desire to forget life. Life is a hideous invention by somebody I don't know. It doesn't last, and it's good for nothing. You break your neck simply living.

That is to be two and to be but one. A man and a woman mingled into one angel. It is heaven.

As for methods of prayer, all of them are good as long as they are sincere.

Every bad institution of this world ends by suicide.

It is a terrible thing to be happy! How pleased we are with it! How all-sufficient we think it! How, being in possession of the false aim of life, happiness, we forget the true aim, duty!

This child whom we Love, Brings daylight Into our soul.

First problem. To produce wealth. Second problem. To distribute it.

Women play with their beauty as children do with their knives. They wound themselves with it.

Ah," cried Gavroche, "what does this mean? It rains again! ...If this continues, I withdraw my subscription.

Is it not when the fall is the lowest that charity ought to be the greatest?

The convent is supreme egotism resulting in supreme self-denial.

The world is the expanding Greece and Greece is the shrinking world.

The saints were his friends, and blessed him; the monsters were his friends, and guarded him.

Slaves would be tyrants were the chance theirs.

Great griefs exhaust. They discourage us with life. The man into whom they enter feels something taken from him. In youth, their visit is sad; later on, it is ominous.

The hatred of luxury is not an intelligent hatred. It implies a hatred of arts.

To love or have loved is all-sufficing. We must not ask for more. No other pearl is to be found in the shadowfolds of life. To love is an accomplishment.

Now, one cannot read nonsense with impunity.

Gavroche had fallen only to rise again; he sat up, a long stream of blood rolled down his face, he raised both arms in air, looked in the direction whence the shot came, and began to sing.

Jean Prouvaire was timid only in repose. Once excited, he burst forth, a sort of mirth accentuated his enthusiasm, and he was at once both laughing and lyric.

The most excellent symbol of the people is the paving stone. One walks on it until it falls on one's head.

Foppery is the egotism of clothes.

Who among us has not sought peace in a song?

A phenomenon often seen. A sceptic adhering to a believer; that is as simple as the law of the complementary colours. What we lack attracts us. Nobody loves the light like the blind man.

Algebra applies to the clouds.

There are plenty who regard a wall behind which something is happening as a very curious thing.

We should judge a man much more surely from what he dreams than from what he thinks.

He had, they said, tasted in succession all the apples of the tree of knowledge, and, whether from hunger or disgust, had ended by tasting the forbidden fruit.