Quotes By Victor Hugo

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

People do not lack strength; they lack will.

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

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

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.

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

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.

Freedom in art, freedom in society, this is the double goal towards which all consistent and logical minds must strive.

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 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.