Inspiring Quotes by Victor Hugo - Page 2

"To learn to read is to light a fire; every syllable that is spelled out is a spark"

"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"

"Reaction - a boat which is going against the current but which does not prevent the river from flowing on"

"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"

"The last resort of kings, the cannonball. The last resort of the people, the paving stone"

"The word is the Verb, and the Verb is God"

"There is nothing like a dream to create the future"

"Well, for us, in history where goodness is a rare pearl, he who was good almost takes precedence over he who was great"

"Civil war? What does that mean? Is there any foreign war? Isn't every war fought between men, between brothers?"

"To rise from error to truth is rare and beautiful"

"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"

"Common sense is in spite of, not as the result of education"

"Close by the Rights of Man, at the least set beside them, are the Rights of the Spirit"

"What a grand thing, to be loved! What a grander thing still, to love!"

"Toleration is the best religion"

"To think of shadows is a serious thing"

"To think is of itself to be useful; it is always and in all cases a striving toward God"

"Concision in style, precision in thought, decision in life"

"Genius: the superhuman in man"

"Genius is a promontory jutting out into the infinite"

"We see past time in a telescope and present time in a microscope. Hence the apparent enormities of the present"

"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"

"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"

"The wise man does not grow old, but ripens"

"The wicked envy and hate; it is their way of admiring"

"The learned man knows that he is ignorant"

"The ideal and the beautiful are identical; the ideal corresponds to the idea, and beauty to form; hence idea and substance are cognate"

"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"

"There are fathers who do not love their children; there is no grandfather who does not adore his grandson"

"Puns are the droppings of soaring wits"

"Certain thoughts are prayers. There are moments when, whatever be the attitude of the body, the soul is on its knees"

"By putting forward the hands of the clock you shall not advance the hour"

"But when ill indeed, Even dismissing the doctor don't always succeed"

"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!"

"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"

"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"

"The beautiful has but one type, the ugly has a thousand"

"Smallness in a great man seems smaller by its disproportion with all the rest"

"Short as life is, we make it still shorter by the careless waste of time"

"Scepticism, that dry caries of the intelligence"

"Rhyme, that enslaved queen, that supreme charm of our poetry, that creator of our meter"

"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"

"Style is the substance of the subject called unceasingly to the surface"

"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"

"I put a Phrygian cap on the old dictionary"

"I don't mind what Congress does, as long as they don't do it in the streets and frighten the horses"

"Hope is the word which God has written on the brow of every man"

"Thought is the labor of the intellect, reverie is its pleasure"

"Love is a portion of the soul itself, and it is of the same nature as the celestial breathing of the atmosphere of paradise"

"Do not let it be your aim to be something, but to be someone"

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