Quotes By Victor Hugo

A great artist is a great man in a great child.

We see past time in a telescope and present time in a microscope. Hence the apparent enormities of the present.

Mankind is not a circle with a single center but an ellipse with two focal points of which facts are one and ideas the other.

Hell is an outrage on humanity. When you tell me that your deity made you in his image, I reply that he must have been very ugly.

Son, brother, father, lover, friend. There is room in the heart for all the affections, as there is room in heaven for all the stars.

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

The brutalities of progress are called revolutions. When they are over we realize this: that the human race has been roughly handled, but that it has advanced.

Concision in style, precision in thought, decision in life.

Evil. Mistrust those who rejoice at it even more than those who do it.

Rhyme, that enslaved queen, that supreme charm of our poetry, that creator of our meter.

No one ever keeps a secret so well as a child.

The human soul has still greater need of the ideal than of the real. It is by the real that we exist; it is by the ideal that we live.

Love is a portion of the soul itself, and it is of the same nature as the celestial breathing of the atmosphere of paradise.

Because one doesn't like the way things are is no reason to be unjust towards God.

It is often necessary to know how to obey a woman in order sometimes to have the right to command her.

Prayer is an august avowal of ignorance.

To be perfectly happy it does not suffice to possess happiness, it is necessary to have deserved it.

The wise man does not grow old, but ripens.

Idleness is the heaviest of all oppressions.

Change your opinions, keep to your principles; change your leaves, keep intact your roots.

The ox suffers, the cart complains.

Men become accustomed to poison by degrees.

Our acts make or mar us, we are the children of our own deeds.

The three great problems of this century; the degradation of man in the proletariat, the subjection of women through hunger, the atrophy of the child by darkness.

Many great actions are committed in small struggles.

To love another person is to see the face of God.

Try as you will, you cannot annihilate that eternal relic of the human heart, love.

An invasion of armies can be resisted, but not an idea whose time has come.

The omnipotence of evil has never resulted in anything but fruitless efforts. Our thoughts always escape from whoever tries to smother them.

The learned man knows that he is ignorant.