Quotes By Victor Hugo

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.

There have been in this century only one great man and one great thing: Napoleon and liberty. For want of the great man, let us have the great thing.

Puns are the droppings of soaring wits.

Sublime upon sublime scarcely presents a contrast, and we need a little rest from everything, even the beautiful.

Wisdom is a sacred communion.

Laughter is the sun that drives winter from the human face.

Habit is the nursery of errors.

Great perils have this beauty, that they bring to light the fraternity of strangers.

Pain is as diverse as man. One suffers as one can.

The mountains, the forest, and the sea, render men savage; they develop the fierce, but yet do not destroy the human.

The animal is ignorant of the fact that he knows. The man is aware of the fact that he is ignorant.

Forty is the old age of youth; fifty the youth of old age.

I don't mind what Congress does, as long as they don't do it in the streets and frighten the horses.

The first symptom of love in a young man is timidity; in a girl boldness.

To rise from error to truth is rare and beautiful.

Nothing else in the world... not all the armies... is so powerful as an idea whose time has come.

The man who does not know other languages, unless he is a man of genius, necessarily has deficiencies in his ideas.

Thought is the labor of the intellect, reverie is its pleasure.

I'm religiously opposed to religion.

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

Hope is the word which God has written on the brow of every man.

By putting forward the hands of the clock you shall not advance the hour.

He, who every morning plans the transactions of the day, and follows that plan, carries a thread that will guide him through a labyrinth of the most busy life.

When a woman is talking to you, listen to what she says with her eyes.

I put a Phrygian cap on the old dictionary.

What is history? An echo of the past in the future; a reflex from the future on the past.

Close by the Rights of Man, at the least set beside them, are the Rights of the Spirit.