Quotes By Victor Hugo

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.

Have courage for the great sorrows of life and patience for the small ones; and when you have laboriously accomplished your daily task, go to sleep in peace.

Nations, like stars, are entitled to eclipse. All is well, provided the light returns and the eclipse does not become endless night. Dawn and resurrection are synonymous. The reappearance of the light is the same as the survival of the soul.

He who opens a school door, closes a prison.

One of the hardest tasks is to extract continually from one's soul an almost inexhaustible ill will.

Adversity makes men, and prosperity makes monsters.

Stupidity talks, vanity acts.

Life is the flower for which love is the honey.

How did it happen that their lips came together? How does it happen that birds sing, that snow melts, that the rose unfolds, that the dawn whitens behind the stark shapes of trees on the quivering summit of the hill? A kiss, and all was said.

Peace is the virtue of civilization. War is its crime.

People do not lack strength; they lack will.