Victor Hugo Quotes

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

By Victor Hugo

Taste is the common sense of genius.

By Victor Hugo

Stupidity talks, vanity acts.

By Victor Hugo

Style is the substance of the subject called unceasingly to the surface.

By Victor Hugo

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.

By Victor Hugo

Sublime upon sublime scarcely presents a contrast, and we need a little rest from everything, even the beautiful.

By Victor Hugo

Son, brother, father, lover, friend. There is room in the heart for all the affections, as there is room in heaven for all the stars.

By Victor Hugo

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

By Victor Hugo

So different are the colours of life, as we look forward to the future, or backward to the past and so different the opinions and sentiments which this contrariety of appearance naturally produces, that the conversation of the old and young ends generally with contempt or pity on either side.

By Victor Hugo

Smallness in a great man seems smaller by its disproportion with all the rest.

By Victor Hugo

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

By Victor Hugo

Should we continue to look upwards Is the light we can see in the sky one of those which will presently be extinguished The ideal is terrifying to behold, lost as it is in the depths, small, isolated, a pin-point, brilliant but threatened on all sides by the dark forces that surround it nevertheless, no more in danger than a star in the jaws of the clouds. (Les Miserables)

By Victor Hugo

Separated lovers cheat absence by a thousand fancies which have their own reality. They are prevented from seeing one another and they cannot write nevertheless they find countless mysterious ways of corresponding, by sending each other the song of birds, the scent of flowers, the laughter of children, the light of the sun, the sighing of the wind, and the gleam of the stars-all the beauties of creation.

By Victor Hugo

Scepticism, that dry caries of the intelligence.

By Victor Hugo

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

By Victor Hugo

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.

By Victor Hugo

Reaction - a boat which is going against the current but which does not prevent the river from flowing on.

By Victor Hugo

Puns are the droppings of soaring wits.

By Victor Hugo

Prayer is an august avowal of ignorance.

By Victor Hugo

Popularity It is glory's small change.

By Victor Hugo

Perseverance, secret of all triumphs.

By Victor Hugo

People do not lack strength, they lack will.

By Victor Hugo

Pain is as diverse as man. One suffers as one can.

By Victor Hugo

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

By Victor Hugo

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

By Victor Hugo

Our acts make or mar us, we are the children of our own deeds.

By Victor Hugo

One sometimes says: 'He killed himself because he was bored with life.' One ought rather to say: 'He killed himself because he was bored by lack of life.'

By Victor Hugo

One sees qualities at a distance and defects at close range.

By Victor Hugo

One of the hardest tasks is to extract continually from one's soul an almost inexhaustible ill will.

By Victor Hugo

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.

By Victor Hugo