Victor Hugo Quotes

“The beginning as well as the end of all his thoughts was hatred of human law, that hatred which, if it be not checked in its growth by some providential event, becomes, in a certain time, hatred of society, then hatred of the human race, and then hatred of creation, and reveals itself by a vague and incessant desire to injure some living being, it matters not who.”

“To rove about, musing, that is to say loitering, is, for a philosopher, a good way of spending time, especially in that kind of mock rurality, ugly but odd, and partaking of two natures, which surrounds certain large cities, particularly Paris.”

“Love is a fault; so be it.”

“Out Milky Way is the dwelling; the nebulae are the city.”

“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.”

“He saw before him two roads, both equally straight ; but he saw two; and that terrified him — him, who had never in his life known but one straight line. And, bitter anguish, these two roads were contradictory.”

“There are no weeds, and no worthless men. There are only bad farmers.”

“It is the end. But of what? The end of France? No. The end of kings? Yes.”

“The eye of a man should be still more reverent before the rising of a young maiden than before the rising of a star. The possibility of touch should increase respect. The down of the peach, the dust of the plum, the radiated crystal of snow, the butterfly’s wing powdered with feathers, are gross things beside that chastity that does not even know it is chaste. The young maiden is only the glimmer of a dream and is not yet statue. Her alcove is hidden in the shadows of the ideal. The indiscreet touch of the eye desecrates this dim penumbra. Here, to gaze, is to profane.”

“It is in the name of Moses that Bellarmin thunderstrikes Galileo; and this great vulgarizer of the great seeker Copernicus, Galileo, the old man of truth, the magian of the heavens, was reduced to repeating on his knees word for word after the inquisitor this formula of shame: "Corde sincera et fide non ficta abjuro maledico et detestor supradictos errores et hereses." Falsehood put an ass's hood on science.”

“Despots play their part in the works of thinkers. Fettered words are terrible words. The writer doubles and trebles the power of his writing when a ruler imposes silence on the people. Something emerges from that enforced silence, a mysterious fullness which filters through and becomes steely in the thought.”

“The thirst for the Infinite proves infinity.”

“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.”

“The day that a woman who is passing before you sheds a light upon you as she goes, you are lost, you love. You have then but one thing to do: to think of her so earnestly that she will be compelled to think of you.”

“Does not beauty confer a benefit upon us, even by the simple fact of being beautiful?”

“Who then understands the reciprocal flux and reflux of the infinitely great and the infinitely small, the echoing of causes in the abysses of being, and the avalanches of creation?”

“To study in Paris is to be born in Paris!”

“France lost a great novel last night.”

“What says the law? You will not kill. How does it say it? By killing!”

“There is no distress so complete but that even in the most critical moments the inexplicable sunrise of hope is seen in its depths.”

“There is one spectacle grander than the sea, That is the sky.”

“If you don't build castles in the air you won't build anything on the ground.”

“Genius: the superhuman in man.”

“There is a material advancement; we desire it. There is, also, a moral grandeur; we hold fast to it.”

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