A compliment is like a kiss through a veil.
- Victor Hugo Quote
A compliment is something like a kiss through a veil.
- Victor Hugo Quote
A creditor is worse than a slave-owner; for the master owns only your person, but a creditor owns your dignity, and can command it.
- Victor Hugo Quote
A faith is a necessity to a man. Woe to him who believes in nothing.
- Victor Hugo Quote
A great artist is a great man in a great child.
- Victor Hugo Quote
A library implies an act of faith.
- Victor Hugo Quote
A man is not idle because he is absorbed in thought. There is a visible labor and there is an invisible labor.
- Victor Hugo Quote
A mother's arms are made of tenderness and children sleep soundly in them.
- Victor Hugo Quote
A war between Europeans is a civil war.
- Victor Hugo Quote
Adversity makes men, and prosperity makes monsters.
- Victor Hugo Quote
All the forces in the world are not so powerful as an idea whose time has come.
- Victor Hugo Quote
Almost all our desires, when examined, contain something too shameful to reveal.
- Victor Hugo Quote
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.
- Victor Hugo Quote
An intelligent hell would be better than a stupid paradise.
- Victor Hugo Quote
An invasion of armies can be resisted, but not an idea whose time has come.
- Victor Hugo Quote
An invasion of armies can be resisted, but not the invasion of ideas.
- Victor Hugo Quote
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.
- Victor Hugo Quote
As a means of contrast with the sublime, the grotesque is, in our view, the richest source that nature can offer.
- Victor Hugo Quote
As the purse is emptied, the heart is filled.
- Victor Hugo Quote
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.
- Victor Hugo Quote
Be like the bird that, passing on her flight awhile on boughs too slight, feels them give way beneath her, and yet sings, knowing that she hath wings.
- Victor Hugo Quote
Blessed be Providence which has given to each his toy: the doll to the child, the child to the woman, the woman to the man, the man to the devil!
- Victor Hugo Quote
But when ill indeed, Even dismissing the doctor don't always succeed.
- Victor Hugo Quote
Certain thoughts are prayers. There are moments when, whatever be the attitude of the body, the soul is on its knees.
- Victor Hugo Quote
Civil war? What does that mean? Is there any foreign war? Isn't every war fought between men, between brothers?
- Victor Hugo Quote
Close by the Rights of Man, at the least set beside them, are the Rights of the Spirit.
- Victor Hugo Quote
Common sense is in spite of, not as the result of education.
- Victor Hugo Quote
Conscience is God present in man.
- Victor Hugo Quote
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.
- Victor Hugo Quote
Despotism is a long crime.
- Victor Hugo Quote
Doing nothing is happiness for children and misery for old men.
- Victor Hugo Quote
Each man should frame life so that at some future hour fact and his dreaming meet.
- Victor Hugo Quote
Evil. Mistrust those who rejoice at it even more than those who do it.
- Victor Hugo Quote
Fashions have done more harm than revolutions.
- Victor Hugo Quote
Freedom in art, freedom in society, this is the double goal towards which all consistent and logical minds must strive.
- Victor Hugo Quote
Genius is a promontory jutting out into the infinite.
- Victor Hugo Quote
Greater than the tread of mighty armies is an idea whose time has come.
- Victor Hugo Quote
Habit is the nursery of errors.
- Victor Hugo Quote
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.
- Victor Hugo Quote
He who is not capable of enduring poverty is not capable of being free.
- Victor Hugo Quote
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.
- Victor Hugo Quote
Hope is the word which God has written on the brow of every man.
- Victor Hugo Quote
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.
- Victor Hugo Quote
I am a soul. I know well that what I shall render up to the grave is not myself. That which is myself will go elsewhere. Earth, thou art not my abyss!
- Victor Hugo Quote
I don't mind what Congress does, as long as they don't do it in the streets and frighten the horses.
- Victor Hugo Quote
I love all men who think, even those who think otherwise than myself.
- Victor Hugo Quote
I put a Phrygian cap on the old dictionary.
- Victor Hugo Quote
Indigestion is charged by God with enforcing morality on the stomach.
- Victor Hugo Quote
Initiative is doing the right thing without being told.
- Victor Hugo Quote
Intelligence is the wife, imagination is the mistress, memory is the servant.
- Victor Hugo Quote
It is by suffering that human beings become angels.
- Victor Hugo Quote
It is most pleasant to commit a just action which is disagreeable to someone whom one does not like.
- Victor Hugo Quote
It is nothing to die. It is frightful not to live.
- Victor Hugo Quote
It is often necessary to know how to obey a woman in order sometimes to have the right to command her.
- Victor Hugo Quote
Joy's smile is much closer to tears than laughter.
- Victor Hugo Quote
Laughter is the sun that drives winter from the human face.
- Victor Hugo Quote
Liberation is not deliverance.
- Victor Hugo Quote
Life is the flower for which love is the honey.
- Victor Hugo Quote
Life's greatest happiness is to be convinced we are loved.
- Victor Hugo Quote
Love is a portion of the soul itself, and it is of the same nature as the celestial breathing of the atmosphere of paradise.
- Victor Hugo Quote
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.
- Victor Hugo Quote
Many great actions are committed in small struggles.
- Victor Hugo Quote
Men become accustomed to poison by degrees.
- Victor Hugo Quote
Music expresses that which cannot be said and on which it is impossible to be silent.
- Victor Hugo Quote
My tastes are aristocratic, my actions democratic.
- Victor Hugo Quote
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.
- Victor Hugo Quote
Nature has made a pebble and a female. The lapidary makes the diamond, and the lover makes the woman.
- Victor Hugo Quote
Never laugh at those who suffer; suffer sometimes those who laugh.
- Victor Hugo Quote
No one can keep a secret better than a child.
- Victor Hugo Quote
No one ever keeps a secret so well as a child.
- Victor Hugo Quote
One believes others will do what he will do to himself.
- Victor Hugo Quote
One can resist the invasion of an army but one cannot resist the invasion of ideas.
- Victor Hugo Quote
One is not idle because one is absorbed. There is both visible and invisible labor. To contemplate is to toil, to think is to do. The crossed arms work, the clasped hands act. The eyes upturned to Heaven are an act of creation.
- Victor Hugo Quote
One of the hardest tasks is to extract continually from one's soul an almost inexhaustible ill will.
- Victor Hugo Quote
Our acts make or mar us, we are the children of our own deeds.
- Victor Hugo Quote
Peace is the virtue of civilization. War is its crime.
- Victor Hugo Quote
People do not lack strength; they lack will.
- Victor Hugo Quote
Perseverance, secret of all triumphs.
- Victor Hugo Quote
Prayer is an august avowal of ignorance.
- Victor Hugo Quote
Puns are the droppings of soaring wits.
- Victor Hugo Quote
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.
- Victor Hugo Quote
Short as life is, we make it still shorter by the careless waste of time.
- Victor Hugo Quote
Smallness in a great man seems smaller by its disproportion with all the rest.
- Victor Hugo Quote
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.
- Victor Hugo Quote
Sorrow is a fruit. God does not make it grow on limbs too weak to bear it.
- Victor Hugo Quote
Strange to say, the luminous world is the invisible world; the luminous world is that which we do not see. Our eyes of flesh see only night.
- Victor Hugo Quote
Strong and bitter words indicate a weak cause.
- Victor Hugo Quote
Style is the substance of the subject called unceasingly to the surface.
- Victor Hugo Quote
Taste is the common sense of genius.
- Victor Hugo Quote
The animal is ignorant of the fact that he knows. The man is aware of the fact that he is ignorant.
- Victor Hugo Quote
The beautiful has but one type, the ugly has a thousand.
- Victor Hugo Quote
The first symptom of love in a young man is shyness; the first symptom in a woman, it's boldness.
- Victor Hugo Quote
The first symptom of love in a young man is timidity; in a girl boldness.
- Victor Hugo Quote
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.
- Victor Hugo Quote
The ideal and the beautiful are identical; the ideal corresponds to the idea, and beauty to form; hence idea and substance are cognate.
- Victor Hugo Quote
The last resort of kings, the cannonball. The last resort of the people, the paving stone.
- Victor Hugo Quote
The little people must be sacred to the big ones, and it is from the rights of the weak that the duty of the strong is comprised.
- Victor Hugo Quote
The man who does not know other languages, unless he is a man of genius, necessarily has deficiencies in his ideas.
- Victor Hugo Quote
The ode lives upon the ideal, the epic upon the grandiose, the drama upon the real.
- Victor Hugo Quote
The omnipotence of evil has never resulted in anything but fruitless efforts. Our thoughts always escape from whoever tries to smother them.
- Victor Hugo Quote
The soul has illusions as the bird has wings: it is supported by them.
- Victor Hugo Quote
The supreme happiness of life is the conviction that we are loved; loved for ourselves, or rather in spite of ourselves.
- Victor Hugo Quote
The wicked envy and hate; it is their way of admiring.
- Victor Hugo Quote
The wise man does not grow old, but ripens.
- Victor Hugo Quote
There are fathers who do not love their children; there is no grandfather who does not adore his grandson.
- Victor Hugo Quote
There are thoughts which are prayers. There are moments when, whatever the posture of the body, the soul is on its knees.
- Victor Hugo Quote
There is nothing like a dream to create the future.
- Victor Hugo Quote
There is one spectacle grander than the sea, that is the sky; there is one spectacle grander than the sky, that is the interior of the soul.
- Victor Hugo Quote
There is one thing stronger than all the armies in the world, and that is an idea whose time as come.
- Victor Hugo Quote
Those who live are those who fight.
- Victor Hugo Quote
Thought is the labor of the intellect, reverie is its pleasure.
- Victor Hugo Quote
To be perfectly happy it does not suffice to possess happiness, it is necessary to have deserved it.
- Victor Hugo Quote
To contemplate is to look at shadows.
- Victor Hugo Quote
To learn to read is to light a fire; every syllable that is spelled out is a spark.
- Victor Hugo Quote
To love beauty is to see light.
- Victor Hugo Quote
To love is to act.
- Victor Hugo Quote
To rise from error to truth is rare and beautiful.
- Victor Hugo Quote
To think of shadows is a serious thing.
- Victor Hugo Quote
Toleration is the best religion.
- Victor Hugo Quote
Virtue has a veil, vice a mask.
- Victor Hugo Quote
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.
- Victor Hugo Quote
Well, for us, in history where goodness is a rare pearl, he who was good almost takes precedence over he who was great.
- Victor Hugo Quote
What is history? An echo of the past in the future; a reflex from the future on the past.
- Victor Hugo Quote
What would be ugly in a garden constitutes beauty in a mountain.
- Victor Hugo Quote
When a woman is talking to you, listen to what she says with her eyes.
- Victor Hugo Quote
When dictatorship is a fact, revolution becomes a right.
- Victor Hugo Quote
When God desires to destroy a thing, he entrusts its destruction to the thing itself. Every bad institution of this world ends by suicide.
- Victor Hugo Quote
When grace is joined with wrinkles, it is adorable. There is an unspeakable dawn in happy old age.
- Victor Hugo Quote
When liberty returns, I will return.
- Victor Hugo Quote
Wisdom is a sacred communion.
- Victor Hugo Quote
