Victor Hugo Quotes

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

A man is not idle because he is absorbed in thought. There is a visible labor and there is an invisible labor.

If God had intended that man should go backward, he would have given him eyes in the back of his head.

Inspiration and genius -one and the same.

Nature, like a kind and smiling mother, lends herself to our dreams and cherishes our fancies.

A war between Europeans is a civil war.

The clouds, - the only birds that never sleep.

She had had sweet dreams, which possibly arose from the fact that her little bed was very white.

Certain thoughts are prayers. There are moments when, whatever be the attitude of the body, the soul is on its knees.

Nothing is so stifling as symmetry. Symmetry is boredom, the quintessence of mourning. Despair yawns. There is something more terrible than a hell of suffering - a hell of boredom.

My misfortune is that I still resemble a man too much. I should liked to be wholly a beast like that goat. - Quasimodo

Out Milky Way is the dwelling; the nebulae are the city.

To put everything in balance is good, to put everything in harmony is better.

Life is a theatre set in which there are but few practicable entrances.

Reaction - a boat which is going against the current but which does not prevent the river from flowing on.

The most powerful symptom of love is a tenderness which becomes at times almost insupportable.

Revolutions spring not from accident, but from necessity. A revolution is a return from the factitious to the real. It takes place because it must.

Liberation is not deliverance.

He never went out without a book under his arm, and he often came back with two.

God made only water, but man made wine.

If you look in the eyes of the young, you see flame. If you look in the eyes of the old, you see light.

If you are stone, be magnetic; if a plant, be sensitive; but if you are human be love.

Labor is life; thought is light.

As the purse is emptied, the heart is filled.

What matters deafness of the ear, when the mind hears? The one true deafness, the incurable deafness, is that of the mind.

If I were Jesus Christ, I would save Judas.

Let us study things that are no more. It is necessary to understand them, if only to avoid them.

You who suffer because you love, love still more. To die of love, is to live by it.

Fashions have done more harm than revolutions.

There is one thing stronger than all the armies in the world, and that is an idea whose time as come.

Melancholy is the pleasure of being sad.

To love or have loved, that is enough. Ask nothing further. There is no other pearl to be found in the dark folds of life.

There are many tongues to talk, and but few heads to think.

A man without a woman is like a pistol without a trigger; it is the woman who makes the man go off.

The quantity of civilization is measured by the quality of imagination.

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

When liberty returns, I will return.

The poetic element lying hidden in most women is the source of their magnetic attraction.

A criminal remains a criminal whether he uses a convict's suit or a monarch's crown.

From a political point of view, there is but one principle, the sovereignty of man over himself. This sovereignty of myself over myself is called Liberty

I see black light (his last words)

A garden to walk in and immensity to dream in--what more could he ask? A few flowers at his feet and above him the stars.

Joy's smile is much closer to tears than laughter.

What I feel for you seems less of earth and more of a cloudless heaven.

Men hate those to whom they have to lie.

Every man is a book in which God himself writes.

It is man's consolation that the future is to be a sunrise instead of a sunset.

Life is a flower of which love is honey.

Mothers arms are made of tenderness, And sweet sleep blesses the child who lies therein.

A house is built of logs and stone, of tiles and posts and piers; a home is built of loving deeds that stand a thousand years.