Quotes by Victor Marie Hugo
No one ever keeps a secret so well as a child.
Have no fear of robbers or murderers. They are external dangers, petty dangers. We should fear ourselves. Prejudices are the real robbers; vices the real murders. The great dangers are within us. Why worry about what threatens our heads or purses? Let us think instead of what threatens our souls.
Our acts make or mar us, we are the children of our own deeds.
A faith is a necessity to a man. Woe to him who believes in nothing.
There is one thing stronger than all the armies in the world, and that is an idea whose time as come.
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.
Forty is the old age of youth; fifty the youth of old age.
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.
There is a sacred horror about everything grand. It is easy to admire mediocrity and hills; but whatever is too lofty, a genius as well as a mountain, an assembly as well as a masterpiece, seen too near, is appalling.
The convent, which belongs to the West as it does to the East, to antiquity as it does to the present time, to Buddhism and Muhammadanism as it does to Christianity, is one of the optical devices whereby man gains a glimpse of infinity.
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.
There are thoughts which are prayers. There are moments when, whatever the posture of the body, the soul is on its knees.
The brutalities of progress are called revolutions. When they are over we realize this: that the human race has been roughly handled, but that it has advanced.
My tastes are aristocratic, my actions democratic.
Liberation is not deliverance.
Habit is the nursery of errors.
Music expresses that which cannot be said and on which it is impossible to be silent.
To learn to read is to light a fire; every syllable that is spelled out is a spark.
Great perils have this beauty, that they bring to light the fraternity of strangers.
Life is the flower for which love is the honey.
Curiosity is one of the forms of feminine bravery.
One can resist the invasion of an army but one cannot resist the invasion of ideas.
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.
"Is there no hope?" the sick man said, The silent doctor shook his head, And took his leave with signs of sorrow, Despairing of his fee to-morrow.
Adversity makes men, and prosperity makes monsters.
