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Victor Hugo [1802-1885] French

Rank: 4
Poet (with poems), Poet

Bipolar disorder, Deism, Didactism, Fantasy, National, Romanticism, Slavery, Vernacular

Victor Marie Hugo was a French poet, novelist, and dramatist of the Romantic movement. He is considered one of the greatest and best-known French writers.

Beauty, Happiness, Love, Nature, Faith, Future, Intelligence, Poetry, Age, Dreams, Education, Freedom, God, Men, Peace, Religion, Smile, Society, Strength, Time, Wisdom, Architecture, Art, Attitude, Brainy, Change, Courage, Father's Day, Funny, Great, History, Hope, Imagination, Inspirational, Life, Morning, Mother's Day, Music, Patience, Power, Relationship, Romantic, Sympathy, Thanksgiving, Truth, Valentine's Day, Women

Quote	Tags	Rank
Music expresses that which cannot be said and on which it is impossible to be silent.	Music	101
Laughter is the sun that drives winter from the human face.		102
Life is the flower for which love is the honey.	Life, Love	103
When a woman is talking to you, listen to what she says with her eyes.	Relationship	104
A mother's arms are made of tenderness and children sleep soundly in them.	Mother's Day	105
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.	Valentine's Day	106
Be as a bird perched on a frail branch that she feels bending beneath her, still she sings away all the same, knowing she has wings.		107
To give thanks in solitude is enough. Thanksgiving has wings and goes where it must go. Your prayer knows much more about it than you do.	Thanksgiving	108
The soul has illusions as the bird has wings: it is supported by them.		109
The wise man does not grow old, but ripens.		110
Change your opinions, keep to your principles; change your leaves, keep intact your roots.	Change	111
The ode lives upon the ideal, the epic upon the grandiose, the drama upon the real.		112
It is from books that wise people derive consolation in the troubles of life.		113
Society is a republic. When an individual tries to lift themselves above others, they are dragged down by the mass, either by ridicule or slander.	Society	114
No one knows like a woman how to say things which are at once gentle and deep.		115
Doing nothing is happiness for children and misery for old men.	Happiness, Men	116
An invasion of armies can be resisted, but not an idea whose time has come.	Time	117
Forty is the old age of youth; fifty the youth of old age.	Age	118
When grace is joined with wrinkles, it is adorable. There is an unspeakable dawn in happy old age.	Age	119
Have courage for the great sorrows of life and patience for the small ones; and when you have laboriously accomplished your daily task, go to sleep in peace.	Courage, Great, Patience, Peace	120
There are fathers who do not love their children; there is no grandfather who does not adore his grandson.		121
Whenever a man's friends begin to compliment him about looking young, he may be sure that they think he is growing old.		122
Be like the bird who, pausing in her flight awhile on boughs too slight, feels them give way beneath her, and yet sings, knowing she hath wings.		123
An intelligent hell would be better than a stupid paradise.		124
As the purse is emptied, the heart is filled.		125
To learn to read is to light a fire; every syllable that is spelled out is a spark.		126
All the forces in the world are not so powerful as an idea whose time has come.	Power, Time	201
Our acts make or mar us, we are the children of our own deeds.		202
Adversity makes men, and prosperity makes monsters.	Men	203
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.		204
He, who every morning plans the transactions of the day, and follows that plan, carries a thread that will guide him through a labyrinth of the most busy life.	Morning	205
Thought is the labor of the intellect, reverie is its pleasure.		206
A compliment is something like a kiss through a veil.	Inspirational	207
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.		208
My tastes are aristocratic, my actions democratic.		209
The human soul has still greater need of the ideal than of the real. It is by the real that we exist; it is by the ideal that we live.		210
There is one spectacle grander than the sea, that is the sky; there is one spectacle grander than the sky, that is the interior of the soul.		211
What would be ugly in a garden constitutes beauty in a mountain.	Beauty, Nature	212
To love is to act.	Love	213
Blessed be Providence which has given to each his toy: the doll to the child, the child to the woman, the woman to the man, the man to the devil!		214
Jesus wept; Voltaire smiled. From that divine tear and from that human smile is derived the grace of present civilization.	Smile	215
Intelligence is the wife, imagination is the mistress, memory is the servant.	Imagination, Intelligence	216
Virtue has a veil, vice a mask.	Beauty	217
We see past time in a telescope and present time in a microscope. Hence the apparent enormities of the present.		218
Perseverance, secret of all triumphs.		219
The ox suffers, the cart complains.		220
Rhyme, that enslaved queen, that supreme charm of our poetry, that creator of our meter.	Poetry	221
I am an intelligent river which has reflected successively all the banks before which it has flowed by meditating only on the images offered by those changing shores.		222
Pain is as diverse as man. One suffers as one can.		223
Dear God! how beauty varies in nature and art. In a woman the flesh must be like marble; in a statue the marble must be like flesh.	Art, Beauty, God, Nature	224
When God desires to destroy a thing, he entrusts its destruction to the thing itself. Every bad institution of this world ends by suicide.	God	225
Nature has made a pebble and a female. The lapidary makes the diamond, and the lover makes the woman.	Nature	226
The beautiful has but one type, the ugly has a thousand.		301
Without vanity, without coquetry, without curiosity, in a word, without the fall, woman would not be woman. Much of her grace is in her frailty.		302
Concision in style, precision in thought, decision in life.		303
Hope is the word which God has written on the brow of every man.	Hope	304
When dictatorship is a fact, revolution becomes a right.		305
Liberation is not deliverance.	Freedom	306
Strong and bitter words indicate a weak cause.	Strength	307
The greatest happiness of life is the conviction that we are loved; loved for ourselves, or rather, loved in spite of ourselves.	Happiness, Love	308
There is nothing like a dream to create the future.	Future	309
Everything being a constant carnival, there is no carnival left.		310
Fashions have done more harm than revolutions.	Funny	311
To love beauty is to see light.	Beauty	312
Try as you will, you cannot annihilate that eternal relic of the human heart, love.		313
Joy's smile is much closer to tears than laughter.	Smile	314
The mountains, the forest, and the sea, render men savage; they develop the fierce, but yet do not destroy the human.		315
Initiative is doing the right thing without being told.		316
Common sense is in spite of, not as the result of education.	Education	317
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.		318
Curiosity is one of the forms of feminine bravery.		319
Mankind is not a circle with a single center but an ellipse with two focal points of which facts are one and ideas the other.		320
Each man should frame life so that at some future hour fact and his dreaming meet.	Dreams, Future	321
The first symptom of love in a young man is timidity; in a girl boldness.		322
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.		323
I'm religiously opposed to religion.	Religion	324
Short as life is, we make it still shorter by the careless waste of time.		325
Sorrow is a fruit. God does not make it grow on limbs too weak to bear it.	Sympathy	326
What is history? An echo of the past in the future; a reflex from the future on the past.	Future, History	401
Love is a portion of the soul itself, and it is of the same nature as the celestial breathing of the atmosphere of paradise.	Nature, Romantic	402
Evil. Mistrust those who rejoice at it even more than those who do it.		403
A great artist is a great man in a great child.		404
To be perfectly happy it does not suffice to possess happiness, it is necessary to have deserved it.	Happiness	405
The animal is ignorant of the fact that he knows. The man is aware of the fact that he is ignorant.		406
The ideal and the beautiful are identical; the ideal corresponds to the idea, and beauty to form; hence idea and substance are cognate.	Beauty	407
To contemplate is to look at shadows.		408
Reaction - a boat which is going against the current but which does not prevent the river from flowing on.		409
Men become accustomed to poison by degrees.		410
Taste is the common sense of genius.		411
Son, brother, father, lover, friend. There is room in the heart for all the affections, as there is room in heaven for all the stars.	Father's Day	412
To rise from error to truth is rare and beautiful.	Truth	413
The three great problems of this century; the degradation of man in the proletariat, the subjection of women through hunger, the atrophy of the child by darkness.	Women	414
Love that is not jealous is neither true nor pure.		415
Certain thoughts are prayers. There are moments when, whatever be the attitude of the body, the soul is on its knees.	Attitude	416
Hell is an outrage on humanity. When you tell me that your deity made you in his image, I reply that he must have been very ugly.		417
To love another person is to see the face of God.	Love	418
Life's greatest happiness is to be convinced we are loved.	Happiness	419
Stupidity talks, vanity acts.		420
To think of shadows is a serious thing.		421
I love all men who think, even those who think otherwise than myself.		422
It is nothing to die. It is frightful not to live.		423
What a grand thing, to be loved! What a grander thing still, to love!		424
Freedom in art, freedom in society, this is the double goal towards which all consistent and logical minds must strive.	Freedom, Society	425
Men like me are impossible until the day when they become necessary.		426
Despotism is a long crime.		501
Sublime upon sublime scarcely presents a contrast, and we need a little rest from everything, even the beautiful.		502
It is often necessary to know how to obey a woman in order sometimes to have the right to command her.		503
Prayer is an august avowal of ignorance.		504
Because one doesn't like the way things are is no reason to be unjust towards God.		505
One of the hardest tasks is to extract continually from one's soul an almost inexhaustible ill will.		506
Religions do a useful thing: they narrow God to the limits of man. Philosophy replies by doing a necessary thing: it elevates man to the plane of God.		507
A man is not idle because he is absorbed in thought. There is a visible labor and there is an invisible labor.		508
There is one thing stronger than all the armies in the world, and that is an idea whose time as come.		509
Nothing else in the world... not all the armies... is so powerful as an idea whose time has come.		510
One can resist the invasion of an army but one cannot resist the invasion of ideas.	Brainy	511
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.	Architecture	512
Habit is the nursery of errors.	Wisdom	513
Wisdom is a sacred communion.	Wisdom	514
Toleration is the best religion.	Religion	515
Genius is a promontory jutting out into the infinite.		516
Greater than the tread of mighty armies is an idea whose time has come.		517
Civil war? What does that mean? Is there any foreign war? Isn't every war fought between men, between brothers?		518
Peace is the virtue of civilization. War is its crime.	Peace	519
People do not lack strength; they lack will.	Strength	520
No one can keep a secret better than a child.		521
It is the end. But of what? The end of France? No. The end of kings? Yes.		522
Do not let it be your aim to be something, but to be someone.		523
The last resort of kings, the cannonball. The last resort of the people, the paving stone.		524
Strange to say, the luminous world is the invisible world; the luminous world is that which we do not see. Our eyes of flesh see only night.		525
Our life dreams the Utopia. Our death achieves the Ideal.	Dreams	526
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.		601
What Shakespeare was able to do in English he would certainly not have done in French.		602
Death has its revelations: the great sorrows which open the heart open the mind as well; light comes to us with our grief. As for me, I have faith; I believe in a future life. How could I do otherwise? My daughter was a soul; I saw this soul. I touched it, so to speak.	Faith	603
A society that admits misery, a humanity that admits war, seem to me an inferior society and a debased humanity; it is a higher society and a more elevated humanity at which I am aiming - a society without kings, a humanity without barriers.		604
He who opens a school door, closes a prison.	Education	605
When a man is out of sight, it is not too long before he is out of mind.		606
Great perils have this beauty, that they bring to light the fraternity of strangers.	Beauty	607
A library implies an act of faith.	Faith	608
It is by suffering that human beings become angels.		609
Puns are the droppings of soaring wits.		610
A war between Europeans is a civil war.		611
Almost all our desires, when examined, contain something too shameful to reveal.		612
By putting forward the hands of the clock you shall not advance the hour.		613
The man who does not know other languages, unless he is a man of genius, necessarily has deficiencies in his ideas.		614
As a means of contrast with the sublime, the grotesque is, in our view, the richest source that nature can offer.		615
The word is the Verb, and the Verb is God.		616
The learned man knows that he is ignorant.		617
I am a soul. I know well that what I shall render up to the grave is not myself. That which is myself will go elsewhere. Earth, thou art not my abyss!		618
He who is not capable of enduring poverty is not capable of being free.		619
Many great actions are committed in small struggles.		620
The wicked envy and hate; it is their way of admiring.		621
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.'		622
Thought is more than a right - it is the very breath of man. Whoever fetters thought attacks man himself. To speak, to write, to publish, are things, so far as the right is concerned, absolutely identical. They are the ever-enlarging circles of intelligence in action; they are the sonorous waves of thought.	Intelligence	623
Love is jealous, and ingenious in self-torture in proportion as it is pure and intense.		624
In the French language, there is a great gulf between prose and poetry; in English, there is hardly any difference. It is a splendid privilege of the great literary languages Greek, Latin, and French that they possess a prose. English has not this privilege. There is no prose in English.	Poetry	625
The most powerful symptom of love is a tenderness which becomes at times almost insupportable.		626
When a man understands the art of seeing, he can trace the spirit of an age and the features of a king even in the knocker on a door.		701
A faith is a necessity to a man. Woe to him who believes in nothing.	Faith	702
I don't mind what Congress does, as long as they don't do it in the streets and frighten the horses.		703
There are thoughts which are prayers. There are moments when, whatever the posture of the body, the soul is on its knees.		704
The supreme happiness of life is the conviction that we are loved; loved for ourselves, or rather in spite of ourselves.		705
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.		706
No one ever keeps a secret so well as a child.		707
There is no such thing as a little country. The greatness of a people is no more determined by their numbers than the greatness of a man is by his height.		708
Those who live are those who fight.		709
It is most pleasant to commit a just action which is disagreeable to someone whom one does not like.		710
Smallness in a great man seems smaller by its disproportion with all the rest.		711
Genius: the superhuman in man.		712
Conscience is God present in man.		713
Well, for us, in history where goodness is a rare pearl, he who was good almost takes precedence over he who was great.		714
Style is the substance of the subject called unceasingly to the surface.		715
The flesh is the surface of the unknown.		716
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.		717
Idleness is the heaviest of all oppressions.		718
There have been in this century only one great man and one great thing: Napoleon and liberty. For want of the great man, let us have the great thing.		719
Scepticism, that dry caries of the intelligence.	Intelligence	720
To think is of itself to be useful; it is always and in all cases a striving toward God.		721
The omnipotence of evil has never resulted in anything but fruitless efforts. Our thoughts always escape from whoever tries to smother them.		722
The little people must be sacred to the big ones, and it is from the rights of the weak that the duty of the strong is comprised.		723
The drama is complete poetry. The ode and the epic contain it only in germ; it contains both of them in a state of high development, and epitomizes both.	Poetry	724
We say that slavery has vanished from European civilization, but this is not true. Slavery still exists, but now it applies only to women and its name is prostitution.		725
Indigestion is charged by God with enforcing morality on the stomach.		726
Never laugh at those who suffer; suffer sometimes those who laugh.		801
I put a Phrygian cap on the old dictionary.		802
When liberty returns, I will return.		803
One believes others will do what he will do to himself.		804
But when ill indeed, Even dismissing the doctor don't always succeed.		805
Close by the Rights of Man, at the least set beside them, are the Rights of the Spirit.		806
One sees qualities at a distance and defects at close range.		807
Every diminution of the liberty of the press is followed by a diminution of civilization. Wherever we see the freedom of the press interfered with, there we see the nutrition of the human family interrupted.		808
A noble soul and real poetic talent are almost always inseparable.		809
Love, in the eyes of the world, is either a carnal appetite or a vague fancy, which possession extinguishes or absence destroys. That is why it is commonly said, with a strange abuse of words, that passion does not endure.		810
Verse in itself does not constitute poetry. Verse is only an elegant vestment for a beautiful form. Poetry can express itself in prose, but it does so more perfectly under the grace and majesty of verse. It is poetry of soul that inspires noble sentiments and noble actions as well as noble writings.		811
A poet who is a bad man is a degraded being, baser and more culpable than a bad man who is not a poet.		812
My childhood began, as everybody's childhood begins, with prejudices. Man finds prejudices beside his cradle, puts them from him a little in the course of his career, and often, alas! takes to them again in his old age.		813
There are no rules, no models; rather, there are no rules other than the general laws of Nature.		814
I would have liked to be - indeed, I should have been - a second Rembrandt.		815

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