Quotes By Victor Hugo

Nature has made a pebble and a female. The lapidary makes the diamond, and the lover makes the woman.

A man is not idle because he is absorbed in thought. There is a visible labor and there is an invisible labor.

The ideal and the beautiful are identical; the ideal corresponds to the idea, and beauty to form; hence idea and substance are cognate.

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

It is by suffering that human beings become angels.

Men like me are impossible until the day when they become necessary.

The ode lives upon the ideal, the epic upon the grandiose, the drama upon the real.

Be as a bird perched on a frail branch that she feels bending beneath her, still she sings away all the same, knowing she has wings.

There is nothing like a dream to create the future.

There are fathers who do not love their children; there is no grandfather who does not adore his grandson.

Perseverance, secret of all triumphs.

Never laugh at those who suffer; suffer sometimes those who laugh.

Curiosity is one of the forms of feminine bravery.

When grace is joined with wrinkles, it is adorable. There is an unspeakable dawn in happy old age.

The last resort of kings, the cannonball. The last resort of the people, the paving stone.

There is a sacred horror about everything grand. It is easy to admire mediocrity and hills; but whatever is too lofty, a genius as well as a mountain, an assembly as well as a masterpiece, seen too near, is appalling.

An intelligent hell would be better than a stupid paradise.

To contemplate is to look at shadows.

Each man should frame life so that at some future hour fact and his dreaming meet.

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.

Amnesty is as good for those who give it as for those who receive it. It has the admirable quality of bestowing mercy on both sides.

As the purse is emptied, the heart is filled.

Well, for us, in history where goodness is a rare pearl, he who was good almost takes precedence over he who was great.

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

Joy's smile is much closer to tears than laughter.

What would be ugly in a garden constitutes beauty in a mountain.

Sorrow is a fruit. God does not make it grow on limbs too weak to bear it.

No one knows like a woman how to say things which are at once gentle and deep.

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.

Initiative is doing the right thing without being told.