Victor Hugo
Victor Marie Hugo (1802-02-26 – 1885-05-22) is recognized as the most influential French Romantic writer of the 19th century and is often identified as the greatest French poet.
Found 110 thoughts of Victor Hugo
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.
Victor Hugo
Jesus wept; Voltaire smiled. From that divine tear and from that human smile is derived the grace of present civilization.
Victor Hugo
Laughter is the sun that drives winter from the human face.
Victor Hugo
An invasion of armies can be resisted, but not an idea whose time has come.
Victor Hugo
There are thoughts which are prayers. There are moments when, whatever the posture of the body, the soul is on its knees.
Victor Hugo
Forty is the old age of youth; fifty is the youth of old age.
Victor Hugo
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
Life is the flower for which love is the honey.
Victor Hugo
Let us have compassion for those under chastisement. Alas, who are we ourselves? Who am I and who are you? Whence do we come and is it quite certain that we did nothing before we were born? This earth is not without some resemblance to a gaol. Who knows but that man is a victim of divine justice? Look closely at life. It is so constituted that one senses punishment everywhere.
Victor Hugo
People do not lack strength; they lack will.
Victor Hugo
The greatest blunders, like the thickest ropes, are often compounded of a multitude of strands. Take the rope apart, separate it into the small threads that compose it, and you can break them one by one. You think, "That is all there was!" But twist them all together and you have something tremendous.
Victor Hugo
The first symptom of love in a young man is shyness; the first symptom in a woman, it's boldness.
Victor Hugo
In this world, which is so plainly the antechamber of another, there are no happy men. The true division of humanity is between those who live in light and those who live in darkness. Our aim must be to diminish the number of the latter and increase the number of the former. That is why we demand education and knowledge.
Victor Hugo
The reduction of the universe to a single being, the expansion of a single being even to God, this is love.
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.
Victor Hugo
Progress is the life-style of man. The general life of the human race is called Progress, and so is its collective march. Progress advances, it makes the great human and earthly journey towards what is heavenly and divine; it has its pauses, when it rallies the stragglers, its stopping places when it meditates, contemplating some new and splendid promised land that has suddenly appeared on its horizon. It has its nights of slumber; and it is one of the poignant anxieties of the thinker to see the human spirit lost in shadow, and to grope in the darkness without being able to awake sleeping progress.
Victor Hugo
Initiative is doing the right thing without being told.
Victor Hugo
My tastes are aristocratic, my actions democratic.
Victor Hugo
Life's greatest happiness is to be convinced we are loved.
Victor Hugo
A compliment is something like a kiss through a veil.
Victor Hugo
I met in the street a very poor young man who was in love. His hat was old, his coat worn, his cloak was out at the elbows, the water passed through his shoes, - and the stars through his soul.
Victor Hugo
The most powerful symptom of love is a tenderness which becomes at times almost insupportable.
Victor Hugo
