Quotes by Victor Hugo

The senator...was a smart man who had made his way in life with a single-mindedness oblivious to any of those stumbling blocks known as conscience, sworn oaths, justice, duty...

Curiosity is one of the forms of feminine bravery.

Change your opinions, keep to your principles; change your leaves, keep intact your roots.

To wipe out abuse is not enough; you have to change peoples whole outlook. The mill is no longer standing, but the winds still there, blowing away.

The beautiful is as useful as the useful. He added after a moment’s silence, Perhaps more so.

The women laughed and wept; the crowd stamped their feet enthusiastically, for at that moment Quasimodo was really beautiful. He was handsome — this orphan, this foundling, this outcast.

Style is the shape the ideal takes, rhythm, its movement.

Without seeking to comprehend the incomprehensible, he gazed upon it. He did not study God; he was dazzled by Him.

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.

To write the poem of the human conscience, were it only of a single man, were it only of the most infamous of men, would be to swallow up all epics in a superior and final epic. The conscience is the chaos of chimeras, of lusts and of temptations, the furnace of dreams, the cave of the ideas which are our shame; it is the pandemonium of sophisms, the battlefield of the passions. At certain hours, penetrate within the livid face of a human being who reflects, and look at what lies behind; look into that soul, look into that obscurity. There, beneath the external silence, there are combats of giants as in Homer, mêlées of dragons and hydras, and clouds of phantoms as in Milton, ghostly labyrinths as in Dante. What a gloom enwraps that infinite which each man bears within himself, and by which he measures in despair the desires of his will, and the actions of his life!

His judgement demonstrates that one can be a genius and understand nothing of an art that is not ones own.

People do not read stupidities with impunity.

Reason is intelligence taking exercise. Imagination is intelligence with an erection.

The best minds have their soft spots and sometimes feel somewhat bruised by the scant respect of logic.

Let us study things that are no more. It is necessary to understand them, if only to avoid them.

History has its truth, and so has legend. Legendary truth is of another nature than historical truth. Legendary truth is invention whose result is reality. Furthermore, history and legend have the same goal; to depict eternal man beneath momentary man.

This light of history is pitiless; it has a strange and divine quality that, luminous as it is, and precisely because it is luminous, often casts a shadow just where we saw a radiance; out of the same man it makes two different phantoms, and the one attacks and punishes the other, the darkness of the despot struggles with the splendor of the captain. Hence a truer measure in the final judgment of the nations. Babylon violated diminishes Alexander; Rome enslaved diminishes Caesar; massacred Jerusalem diminishes Titus. Tyranny follows the tyrant. Woe to the man who leaves behind a shadow that bears his form.

On coming out of the chapel, a well can be seen on the left. There are two in this yard. You ask, Why is there no bucket and no pulley to this one? Because no water is drawn from it now. Why is no more water drawn from it? Because it is full of skeletons.

There is always more misery among the lower classes than there is humanity in the higher.

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