Victor Hugo quotes Born: 02/26/1802 Country: france

• It is not enough for us to prostrate ourselves under the tree which is Creation, and to contemplate its tremendous branches filled with stars. We have a duty to perform, to work upon the human soul, to defend the mystery against the miracle, to worship the incomprehensible while rejecting the absurd; to accept, in the inexplicable, only what is necessary; to dispel the superstitions that surround religion --to rid God of His Maggots. (Victor Hugo) [creation/human/absurd/religion]
• To learn to read is to light a fire; every syllable that is spelled out is a spark. (Victor Hugo) [light]
• It is from books that wise people derive consolation in the troubles of life. (Victor Hugo) [books/people/consolation/life]
• There are fathers who do not love their children, but there is no grandfather who does not adore his grandson. (Victor Hugo) [love/grandfather]
• We are the children of our own deeds. (Victor Hugo)
• There is no more sovereign eloquence than the truth in indignation. (Victor Hugo) [more/eloquence/truth]
• A man is not idle because he is absorbed in thought. There is visible labor and there is invisible labor. (Victor Hugo)
• A compliment is something like a kiss through a veil. (Victor Hugo) [kiss]
• Curiosity is one of the forms of feminine bravery. (Victor Hugo) [curiosity]
• Common sense is in spite of, not as the result of education. (Victor Hugo) [result/education]
• As the purse is emptied, the heart is filled. (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. (Victor Hugo) [master]
• 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. (Victor Hugo) [think/eyes/creation]
• 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. (Victor Hugo) [words/words/power/silence]
• There exists, at the bottom of all abasement and misfortune, a last extreme which rebels and joins battle with the forces of law and respectability in a desperate struggle, waged partly by cunning and partly by violence, at once sick and ferocious, in which it attacks the prevailing social order with the pin-pricks of vice and the hammer-blows of crime. (Victor Hugo) [misfortune/right/order/crime]
• Genius is a promontory jutting out into the infinite. (Victor Hugo) [genius]
• One cannot be a good historian of the outward, visible world without giving some thought to the hidden, private life of ordinary people; and on the other hand one cannot be a good historian of this inner life without taking into account outward events where these are relevant. They are two orders of fact which reflect each other, which are always linked and which sometimes provoke each other. (Victor Hugo) [life/people/life/account]
• 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. (Victor Hugo) [horror/genius/mountain]
• The greatest blunders, like the thickest ropes, are often compounded of a multitude of strands. Take the rope apart, separate it into the small threads that compose it, and you can break them one by one. You think, That is all there was! But twist them all together and you have something tremendous. (Victor Hugo) [take/think]
• God created the flirt as soon as he made the fool. (Victor Hugo) [god/fool]
• Liberation is not deliverance. (Victor Hugo)
• It is the essence of truth that it is never excessive. Why should it exaggerate? There is that which should be destroyed and that which should be simply illuminated and studied. How great is the force of benevolent and searching examination! We must not resort to the flame where only light is required. (Victor Hugo) [essence/truth/light]
• Close by the Rights of Man, at the least set beside them, are the Rights of the Spirit. (Victor Hugo) [spirit]
• Laughter is the sun that drives winter from the human face. (Victor Hugo) [laughter/sun/human/face]
• The mountains, the forest, and the sea, render men savage; they develop the fierce, but yet do not destroy the human. (Victor Hugo) [men/destroy/human]
• To rescue from oblivion even a fragment of a language which men have used and which is in danger of being lost --that is to say, one of the elements, whether good or bad, which have shaped and complicated civilization --is to extend the scope of social observation and to serve civilization. (Victor Hugo) [oblivion/language/men/danger]
• The supreme happiness of life is the conviction that we are loved; loved for ourselves, or rather in spite of ourselves. (Victor Hugo) [happiness/life]
• There is one thing stronger than all the armies in the world, and that is an idea whose time has come. (Victor Hugo) [thing/time]
• 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. (Victor Hugo) [love/water]
• Life is the flower for which love is the honey. (Victor Hugo) [life/flower/love]
• To love another person is to see the face of God. [Les Miserables] (Victor Hugo) [love/face/god]

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