Inspiring Quotes by Victor Hugo

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

To reform a man, you must begin with his grandmother.

A man trying to escape never thinks himself sufficiently concealed.

Dirt has been shrewdly termed misplaced material.

As for methods of prayer, all are good, as long as they are sincere.

Inspiration and genius one and the same.

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

Teach the ignorant as much as you can.

He who opens a school door closes a prison.

He does not weep who does not see.

Good night! Good night! Far flies the light; But still God's love Shall shine above, Making all bright, Good night! Good night!

I shall be great and you rich, because we love each other.

It seemed to her almost that she was pretty. This threw her in a singularly troubled state of mind. Up to that moment she had never thought of her face.

A bird alone could have extricated himself from that place.

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

I have been loving you a little more every minute since this morning.

There is no rapture in the love which is prompted by esteem; such affection is lasting, not passionate.

At the shrine of friendship never say die, let the wine of friendship never run dry.

England has two books; the Bible and Shakespeare. England made Shakespeare, but the Bible made England.

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

It was hunger that drove us to exploration. And it took a depression to teach us the real value of a job.

He sought to transform the grief that looks down into the grave by showing it the grief that looks up to the stars.

He was not his father, and this was not his work; but he was the master, and this was his masterpiece.

Take away time is money, and what is left of England? take away cotton is king, and what is left of America?

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

There is something more terrible than a hell of suffering -- a hell of boredom.

Algebra applies to the clouds.

Human society, the world, and the whole of mankind is to be found in the alphabet.

Revolution is the larva of civilization.

The earth is a great piece of stupidity.

If suffer we must, let's suffer on the heights.

Life is a theatre set in which there are but few practicable entrances.

Babylon violated diminishes Alexander; Rome enslaved diminishes Caesar; massacred Jerusalem diminishes Titus. Tyranny follows the tyrant. Woe to the man who leaves behind a shadow that bears his form.

To pay compliments to the one we love is the first method of caressing, a demi-audacity venturing. A compliment is something like a kiss through a veil.

A thousand men enslaved fear one beast free.

Yes, the brutalities of progress are called revolutions.

All roads are blocked to a philosophy which reduces everything to the word 'no.' To 'no' there is only one answer and that is 'yes.'

Great buildings, like great mountains, are the work of centuries.

Cheerfulness is like money well expended in charity; the more we dispense of it, the greater our possession.

All men are made of the same clay.

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

I'd rather be hissed at for a good verse, than applauded for a bad one.

Paris, viewed from the towers of Notre Dame in the cool dawn of a summer morning, is a delectable and a magnificent sight; and the Paris of that period must have been eminently so.

A little girl without a doll is almost as unhappy, and quite as impossible, as a woman without children. from chapter VIII of Les Miserables.

All who suffer are full of hatred; all who live drag a remorse: the dead alone have broken their chains.

A fall from such a height is rarely straight downwards.

You have enemies? Why, it is the story of every man who has done a great deed or created a new idea.

Love is a fault; be it so. Fantine was innocence floating upon the surface of this fault.

Excitement is not enjoyment: in calmness lies true pleasure. The most precious wines are sipped, not bolted at a swallow.

Ces ténèbres, Dea les y avait en elle et Gwynplaine les avait sur lui.

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

Geniuses are disconcerting. Their comings and goings in the ideal world give one vertigo ... They have a telescope in one eye and a microscope in the other.

We are given up to those gods, those monsters, those giants, -- our thoughts.

In the domain of art there is no light without heat.

What a gloomy thing, not to know the address of one's soul.

The saints were his friends, and blessed him; the monsters were his friends, and guarded him.

Genuflection before the idol or the dollar destroys the muscles which walk and the will that moves.

If no one loved, the sun would go out.

To breathe Paris is to preserve one's soul.

Happiness lies for those who cry, those who hurt, those who have searched, and those who have tried for only they can appreciate the importance of people who have touched their lives.

Life is a flower of which love is honey.

People do not read stupidities with impunity.

Women play with their beauty as children do with their knives. They wound themselves with it.

History has its truth; and so has legend hers.

There is a way of meeting error while on the road of truth.

Is it not when the fall is the lowest that charity ought to be the greatest?

People overwhelmed with trouble do not look behind; they know only too well that misfortune follows them.

The most terrible of motives and the most unanswerable of responses: Because.

By making himself a priest he made himself a demon.

I have a dream my life would be. So different from this hell I'm living. So different now from what it seem. Now life has killed the dream I dreamed.

Every bird that flies has the thread of the infinite in its claw.

I like the laughter that opens the lips and the heart, shows at the same time the pearls and the soul.

Anger may be foolish and absurd, and one may be wrongly irritated, but a man never feels outraged unless in some respect he is fundamentally right.

He reached for his pocket, and found there, only reality.

Cities make ferocious men because they make corrupt men. The mountains, the sea, the forest, make savage men; they develop the fierce side, but often without destroying the humane side.

The sadness which reigned everywhere was but an excuse for unfailing kindness.

Above all, you can believe in Providence in either of two ways, either as thirst believes in the orange, or as the ass believes in the whip.

In love there are no friends everywhere where there is a pretty woman hostility is open.

Ideas can no more flow backward than can a river.

He would give all of his clothes to his servant, admonishing him NOT to return them until he had completed his day's work.

Between the government which does evil and the people who accept it -- there is a certain shameful solidarity.

Do not ask the name of the person who seeks a bed for the night. He who is reluctant to give his name is the one who most needs shelter.

During a wise man's whole life, his destiny holds his philosophy in a state of siege.

For sight is woman-like and shuns the old.

Let us leave to the brain what belongs to it, and agree that the work of the men of genius is of the superhuman, the offspring of man.