Best 1058 quotes of Victor Hugo on MyQuotes

A benevolent malefactor, merciful, gentle, helpful, clement, a convict, returning good for evil, giving back pardon for hatred, preferring pity to vengeance, preferring to ruin himself rather than to ruin his enemy, saving him who had smitten him, kneeling on the heights of virtue, more nearly akin to an angel than to a man. Javert was constrained to admit to himself that this monster existed. Things could not go on in this manner.

A bird sings, a child prattles, but it is the same hymn; hymn indistinct, inarticulate, but full of profound meaning.

A bit of mould is a pleiad of flowers; a nebula is an ant-hill of stars.

A breath of Paris preserves the soul.

A cannonball travels only two thousand miles an hour; light travels two hundred thousand miles a second. Such is the superiority of Jesus Christ over Napoleon.

A criminal remains a criminal whether he uses a convict's suit or a monarch's crown.

A day will come when a cannon will be exhibited in museums, just as instruments of torture are now, and the people will be astonished that such a thing could have been.

A day will come when all nations on our continent will form a European brotherhood... A day will come when we shall see... the United States of America and the United States of Europe face to face, reaching out for each other across the seas.

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

A day will come when there will be no battlefields, but markets opening to commerce and minds opening to ideas.

A doctor’s door should never be closed, a priest's door should always be open.

Adversity makes men, and prosperity makes monsters.

A faith is a necessity to a man. Woe to him who believes in nothing.

A few feet under the ground reigns so profound a silence, and yet so much tumult on the surface!

A fixed idea ends in madness or heroism.

A great artist is a great man in a great child.

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.

A joyous little creature, so beautiful, It was as if a gate of Heaven opened as she came in.

A language does not become fixed. The human intellect is always on the march, or, if you prefer, in movement, and languages with it.

Algebra applies to the clouds.

A library implies an act of faith which generations, still in darkness hid, sign in their night in witness of the dawn.

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 animals are to be found in men and each of theme exists in some man, sometimes several at the time.

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." Nihilism has no substance. There is no such thing as nothingness, and zero does not exist. Everything is something. Nothing is nothing. Man lives more by affirmation than by bread.

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.

All that was neither a city, nor a church, nor a river, nor color, nor light, nor shadow: it was reverie. For a long time, I remained motionless, letting myself be penetrated gently by this unspeakable ensemble, by the serenity of the sky and the melancholy of the moment. I do not know what was going on in my mind, and I could not express it; it was one of those ineffable moments when one feels something in himself which is going to sleep and something which is awakening.

All the forces in the world are not so powerful as an idea whose time has come.

All the human and animal manure which the world wastes, if returned to the land, instead of being thrown into the sea, would suffice to nourish the world.

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

Almost all our desires, when examined, contain something too shameful to reveal.

A man is not idle because he is absorbed in thought. There is a visible labor and there is an invisible labor.

A man trying to escape never thinks himself sufficiently concealed.

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.

A mother's arms are made of tenderness and children sleep soundly in them.

And if it happened to be a Christmas-night when the great bell seemed to rattle in its throat as it called the faithful to the midnight mass, there was such an indescribable air of life spread over the sombre facade that the great door-way looked as if it were swallowing the entire crowd, and the rose-window staring at them.

A republic may be called the climate of civilization.

And, moreover, when it happens that both are sincere and good, nothing will mix and amalgamate more easily than an old priest and an old soldier. In reality, they are the same kind of man. One has devoted himself to country upon earth, the other to his country in heaven; there is no other difference.

And the dream that our mind had sketched in haste Shall others continue, but never complete. For none upon earth can achieve his scheme; The best as the worst are futile here: We wake at the self-same point of the dream, All is here begun, and finished elsewhere.

And then, strange to say, the first symptom of true love in a young man is timidity; in a girl, it is boldness.

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.

"Animals are happy," said the queen. "They run no risk of going to hell." "They are there already," replied Josiana.

Animals are nothing but the portrayal of our virtues and vices made manifest to our eyes, the visible reflections of our souls.

An increase of tenderness always ended by boiling over and turning to indignation. He was at the point where we seek to adopt a course, and to accept what tears us apart.

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

A phenomenon often seen. A sceptic adhering to a believer; that is as simple as the law of the complementary colours. What we lack attracts us. Nobody loves the light like the blind man.

A queen, devoid of beauty is not queen; She needs the royalty of beauty's mien.

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.

Art needs no spur beyond itself.

A saint addicted to excessive self-abnegation is a dangerous associate; he may infect you with poverty, and a stiffening of those joints which are needed for advancement-in a word, with more renunciation than you care for-and so you flee the contagion.

As a means of contrast with the sublime, the grotesque is, in our view, the richest source that nature can offer.