Quotes by Victor Marie Hugo
There is always more misery among the lower classes than there is humanity in the higher.
Thought is the labour of the intellect, reverie is its pleasure.
Nature has made a pebble and a female. The lapidary makes the diamond, and the lover makes the woman.
Scepticism, that dry caries of the intelligence.
Rhyme, that enslaved queen, that supreme charm of our poetry, that creator of our meter.
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.'
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.
Smallness in a great man seems smaller by its disproportion with all the rest.
One of the hardest tasks is to extract continually from one's soul an almost inexhaustible ill will.
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)
Life's greatest happiness is to be convinced we are loved.
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.
Nothing awakens a reminiscence like an odor
No one knows like a woman how to say things which are at once gentle and deep.
Oh! love!... That is to be two and to be but one. A man and a woman mingled into one angel. It is heaven.
One can resist an intrusion of armies but not an idea whose time has come.
My friends, remember this, that there are no weeds, and no worthless men, there are only bad farmers.
One believes others will do what he will do to himself.
Nothing discernable to the eye of the spirit is more brilliant or obscure than man; nothing is more formidible, complex, mysterious, and infinite. There is a prospect greater than the sea, and it is the sky; there is a prospect greater than the sky, and it is the human soul.
Short as life is, we make it still shorter by the careless waste of time.
It is by suffering that human beings become angels.
Our life dreams the Utopia. Our death achieves the Ideal.
I put a Phrygian cap on the old dictionary.
It is most pleasant to commit a just action which is disagreeable to someone whom one does not like.
Idleness is the heaviest of all oppressions.
