Victor Hugo Quotes

There are no trifles in the human story, no trifling leaves on the tree.

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

Another story must begin!

Ah! There you are! he exclaimed, looking at Jean Valjean. I'm so glad to see you. Well, but how is this? I gave you the candlesticks too, which are of silver like the rest, and for which you can certainly get two hundred francs. Why did you not carry them away with your forks and spoons?

And do you know Monsieur Marius? I believe I was a little in love with you.

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

If people did not love one another, I really don't see what use there would be in having any spring.

Popularity - a piece of faded tinsel, that is out of date.

Yes, the brutalities of progress are called revolutions

We are reassured almost as foolishly as we are alarmed; human nature is so constituted.

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.

Music is the vapor of art. It is to poetry what reverie is to thought, what fluid is to solid, what the ocean of clouds is to the ocean of waves.

I wanted to see you again, touch you, know who you were, see if I would find you identical with the ideal image of you which had remained with me and perhaps shatter my dream with the aid of reality. -Claude Frollo

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.

A day will come when markets, open to trade, and minds, open to ideas, will become the sole battlefield.

Often the losing of a battle leads to the winning of progress. Less glory but greater liberty: the drum is silent and the voices of reason can be heard.

Curiosity is gluttony. To see is to devour.

Loving is almost a substitute for thinking. Love is a burning forgetfulness of all other things. How shall we ask passion to be logical?

Years place at last a venerable crown upon a head.

There is a determined though unseen bravery that defends itself foot by foot in the darkness against the fatal invasions of necessity and dishonesty. Noble and mysterious triumphs that no eye sees, and no fame rewards, and no flourish of triumph salutes. Life, misfortunes, isolation, abandonment, poverty, are battlefields that have their heroes; obscure heroes, sometimes greater than the illustrious heroes.

You ask me what forces me to speak? a strange thing; my conscience.

A one-eyed man is much more incomplete than a blind man, for he knows what it is that's lacking.

A house is built of logs and stone, of tiles and posts and piers; a home is built of loving deeds that stand a thousand years.

Jean Prouvaire was timid only in repose. Once excited, he burst forth, a sort of mirth accentuated his enthusiasm, and he was at once both laughing and lyric.

Night and the day, when united, Bring forth the beautiful light.

What a grand thing, to be loved! What a grander thing still, to love!

The man who does not know other languages, unless he is a man of genius, necessarily has deficiencies in his ideas.

In this world, which is so plainly the antechamber of another, there are no happy men. The true division of humanity is between those who live in light and those who live in darkness. Our aim must be to diminish the number of the latter and increase the number of the former. That is why we demand education and knowledge.

What matters deafness of the ear, when the mind hears? The one true deafness, the incurable deafness, is that of the mind.

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

To meditate is to labour; to think is to act.

Waterloo is a battle of the first rank won by a captain of the second

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.

She had had sweet dreams, which possibly arose from the fact that her little bed was very white.

Men hate those to whom they have to lie.

When people look back at their childhood or youth, their wistfulness comes from the memory, not of what their lives had been in those years, but of what life had then promised to be. The expectation of some indefinable splendor, of the unusual, the exciting, the great is an attribute of youth and the process of aging is the process of that expectations' gradual extinction. One does not have to let it happen. But that fire dies for lack of fuel, under the gray weight of disappointments.

The future has several names. For the weak, it is impossible; for the fainthearted, it is unknown; but for the valiant, it is ideal.

In the opera we call love, the libretto is almost nothing.

In the Twentieth Century war will be dead, the scaffold will be dead, hatred will be dead, frontier boundaries will be dead, dogmas will be dead; man will live. He will possess something higher than all these-a great country, the whole earth, and a great hope, the whole heaven.

Happiness wishes everybody happy.

It is the essence of truth that it is never excessive.... We must not resort to the flame where only light is required.

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

When we are at the end of life, to die means to go away; when we are at the beginning, to go away means to die.

If we must suffer, let us suffer nobly.

The wicked envy and hate; it is their way of admiring.

I put a Phrygian cap on the old dictionary.

The wind of revolutions is not tractable.

There are many tongues to talk, and but few heads to think.

Houses are like the human beings that inhabit them.

Sire, you are looking at a plain man, and I am looking at a great man. Each of us may benefit.

The beautiful has but one type, the ugly has a thousand.

Winter is on my head, but eternal spring is in my heart. The nearer I approach the end, the plainer I hear around me the immortal symphonies of the worlds which invite me. . . . For half a century I have been writing thoughts in prose, verse, history, drama, romance, tradition, satire, ode, and song. I have tried them all, but I feel I have not said a thousandth part of that which is within me. When I go down to the grave, I can say "I have finished my day's work," but I cannot say "I have finished my life's work."

The first symptom of love in a young man is timidity; in a girl boldness.

Social prosperity means man happy, the citizen free, the nation great.

Music expresses that which cannot be put into words.

The learned man knows that he is ignorant.

Civil war? What does that mean? Is there any foreign war? Isn't every war fought between men, between brothers?

I believe, sir, in all the progress. Air navigation is the result of the oceanic navigation: from water the human has to pass in the air. Everywhere where creation will be breathable to him, the human will penetrate into the creation. Our only limit is life.

One believes others will do what he will do to himself.

The animal is ignorant of the fact that he knows. The man is aware of the fact that he is ignorant.