Victor Hugo quotes

There is nothing like a dream to create the future.

To love beauty is to see light.

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

Death has its revelations: the great sorrows which open the heart open the mind as well; light comes to us with our grief. As for me, I have faith; I believe in a future life. How could I do otherwise? My daughter was a soul; I saw this soul. I touched it, so to speak.

We say that slavery has vanished from European civilization, but this is not true. Slavery still exists, but now it applies only to women and its name is prostitution.

Our life dreams the Utopia. Our death achieves the Ideal.

The drama is complete poetry. The ode and the epic contain it only in germ; it contains both of them in a state of high development, and epitomizes both.

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.

People do not lack strength; they lack will.

Strong and bitter words indicate a weak cause.

The greatest happiness of life is the conviction that we are loved; loved for ourselves, or rather, loved in spite of ourselves.

A compliment is something like a kiss through a veil.

Great perils have this beauty, that they bring to light the fraternity of strangers.

Toleration is the best religion.

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

Life's greatest happiness is to be convinced we are loved.

What is history? An echo of the past in the future; a reflex from the future on the past.

What is history? An echo of the past in the future; a reflex from the future on the past.

Short as life is, we make it still shorter by the careless waste of time.

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.

Thought is more than a right - it is the very breath of man. Whoever fetters thought attacks man himself. To speak, to write, to publish, are things, so far as the right is concerned, absolutely identical. They are the ever-enlarging circles of intelligence in action; they are the sonorous waves of thought.

Forty is the old age of youth; fifty the youth of old age.

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.

Liberation is not deliverance.

A library implies an act of faith.

To love beauty is to see light.

Habit is the nursery of errors.

Adversity makes men, and prosperity makes monsters.

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

Doing nothing is happiness for children and misery for old men.

Intelligence is the wife, imagination is the mistress, memory is the servant.

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

Architecture has recorded the great ideas of the human race. Not only every religious symbol, but every human thought has its page in that vast book.

Death has its revelations: the great sorrows which open the heart open the mind as well; light comes to us with our grief. As for me, I have faith; I believe in a future life. How could I do otherwise? My daughter was a soul; I saw this soul. I touched it, so to speak.

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

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

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

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.

Life is the flower for which love is the honey.

Wisdom is a sacred communion.

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

Death has its revelations: the great sorrows which open the heart open the mind as well; light comes to us with our grief. As for me, I have faith; I believe in a future life. How could I do otherwise? My daughter was a soul; I saw this soul. I touched it, so to speak.

Conscience is God present in man.

Fashions have done more harm than revolutions.

To rise from error to truth is rare and beautiful.

Intelligence is the wife, imagination is the mistress, memory is the servant.

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

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.

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

Dear God! how beauty varies in nature and art. In a woman the flesh must be like marble; in a statue the marble must be like flesh.

Dear God! how beauty varies in nature and art. In a woman the flesh must be like marble; in a statue the marble must be like flesh.

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

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

Every diminution of the liberty of the press is followed by a diminution of civilization. Wherever we see the freedom of the press interfered with, there we see the nutrition of the human family interrupted.

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

Jesus wept; Voltaire smiled. From that divine tear and from that human smile is derived the grace of present civilization.

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

The greatest happiness of life is the conviction that we are loved; loved for ourselves, or rather, loved in spite of ourselves.

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

Dear God! how beauty varies in nature and art. In a woman the flesh must be like marble; in a statue the marble must be like flesh.

Common sense is in spite of, not as the result of education.

A faith is a necessity to a man. Woe to him who believes in nothing.

A war between Europeans is a civil war.

Society is a republic. When an individual tries to lift themselves above others, they are dragged down by the mass, either by ridicule or slander.

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

A war between Europeans is a civil war.

Dear God! how beauty varies in nature and art. In a woman the flesh must be like marble; in a statue the marble must be like flesh.

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

The greatest happiness of life is the conviction that we are loved; loved for ourselves, or rather, loved in spite of ourselves.

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

Scepticism, that dry caries of the intelligence.

He who opens a school door, closes a prison.

Certain thoughts are prayers. There are moments when, whatever be the attitude of the body, the soul is on its knees.

Death has its revelations: the great sorrows which open the heart open the mind as well; light comes to us with our grief. As for me, I have faith; I believe in a future life. How could I do otherwise? My daughter was a soul; I saw this soul. I touched it, so to speak.

Virtue has a veil, vice a mask.

The supreme happiness of life is the conviction that we are loved; loved for ourselves, or rather in spite of ourselves.

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

To love is to act.

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

Our life dreams the Utopia. Our death achieves the Ideal.

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

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

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