Victor Hugo Quotes | Quotes by Victor Hugo

A great artist is a great man in a great child.
+Fav | Go to this Victor Hugo Quote | Victor Hugo

Jesus wept; Voltaire smiled. From that divine tear and from that human smile is derived the grace of present civilization.
+Fav | Go to this Victor Hugo Quote | Victor Hugo

He who opens a school door, closes a prison.
+Fav | Go to this Victor Hugo Quote | Victor Hugo

Great perils have this beauty, that they bring to light the fraternity of strangers.
+Fav | Go to this Victor Hugo Quote | Victor Hugo

The learned man knows that he is ignorant.
+Fav | Go to this Victor Hugo Quote | Victor Hugo

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.
+Fav | Go to this Victor Hugo Quote | Victor Hugo

When grace is joined with wrinkles, it is adorable. There is an unspeakable dawn in happy old age.
+Fav | Go to this Victor Hugo Quote | Victor Hugo

What a grand thing, to be loved! What a grander thing still, to love!
+Fav | Go to this Victor Hugo Quote | 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.
+Fav | Go to this Victor Hugo Quote | Victor Hugo

Certain thoughts are prayers. There are moments when, whatever be the attitude of the body, the soul is on its knees
+Fav | Go to this Victor Hugo Quote | Victor Hugo

Despots play their part in the works of thinkers. Fettered words are terrible words. The writer doubles and trebles the power of his writing when a ruler imposes silence on the people. Something emerges from that enforced silence, a mysterious fullness which filters through and becomes steely in the thought. Repression in history leads to conciseness in the historian, and the rocklike hardness of much celebrated prose is due to the tempering of the tyrant.
+Fav | Go to this Victor Hugo Quote | Victor Hugo

Common sense is in spite of, not as the result of education.
+Fav | Go to this Victor Hugo Quote | Victor Hugo

Curiosity is one of the forms of feminine bravery.
+Fav | Go to this Victor Hugo Quote | Victor Hugo

The mountains, the forest, and the sea, render men savage; they develop the fierce, but yet do not destroy the human.
+Fav | Go to this Victor Hugo Quote | Victor Hugo

From the oyster to the eagle, from the swine to the tiger, all animals are to be found in men and each of them exists in some man, sometimes several at the time. Animals are nothing but the portrayal of our virtues and vices made manifest to our eyes, the visible reflections of our souls. God displays them to us to give us food for thought.
+Fav | Go to this Victor Hugo Quote | Victor Hugo

I'm religiously opposed to religion.
+Fav | Go to this Victor Hugo Quote | Victor Hugo

A compliment is something like a kiss through a veil.
+Fav | Go to this Victor Hugo Quote | Victor Hugo

To learn to read is to light a fire; every syllable that is spelled out is a spark.
+Fav | Go to this Victor Hugo Quote | Victor Hugo

We are on the side of religion as opposed to religions, and we are among those who believe in the wretched inadequacy of sermons and the sublimity of prayer.
+Fav | Go to this Victor Hugo Quote | Victor Hugo

Do you know what friendship is... it is to be brother and sister; two souls which touch without mingling, two fingers on one hand.
+Fav | Go to this Victor Hugo Quote | Victor Hugo

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.
+Fav | Go to this Victor Hugo Quote | Victor Hugo

When God desires to destroy a thing, he entrusts its destruction to the thing itself. Every bad institution of this world ends by suicide.
+Fav | Go to this Victor Hugo Quote | Victor Hugo

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.
+Fav | Go to this Victor Hugo Quote | Victor Hugo

When liberty returns, I will return.
+Fav | Go to this Victor Hugo Quote | Victor Hugo

The man who does not know other languages, unless he is a man of genius, necessarily has deficiencies in his ideas.
+Fav | Go to this Victor Hugo Quote | Victor Hugo