Quotes By Victor Hugo

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.

One is not idle because one is absorbed. There is both visible and invisible labor. To contemplate is to toil, to think is to do. The crossed arms work, the clasped hands act. The eyes upturned to Heaven are an act of creation.

To love beauty is to see light.

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

All the forces in the world are not so powerful as an idea whose time has come.

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

Despotism is a long crime.

To give thanks in solitude is enough. Thanksgiving has wings and goes where it must go. Your prayer knows much more about it than you do.

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.'

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.

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.

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.

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

Wisdom is a sacred communion.