Victor Hugo quotes

“He who is not capable of enduring poverty is not capable of being free.”

— Victor Hugo

“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. ”

— 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. ”

— Victor Hugo

“Nature has made a pebble and a female. The lapidary makes the diamond, and the lover makes the woman. ”

— Victor Hugo

“One believes others will do what he will do to himself.”

— Victor Hugo

“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.”

— 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. ”

— Victor Hugo

“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.”

— 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. ”

— Victor Hugo

“Hope is the word which God has written on the brow of every man.”

— Victor Hugo

“But when ill indeed, Even dismissing the doctor don't always succeed.”

— Victor Hugo

“Liberation is not deliverance. ”

— Victor Hugo

“When a man is out of sight, it is not too long before he is out of mind.”

— Victor Hugo

“Whenever a man's friends begin to compliment him about looking young, he may be sure that they think he is growing old. ”

— Victor Hugo

“One can resist the invasion of an army but one cannot resist the invasion of ideas.”

— 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.”

— Victor Hugo

“Everything being a constant carnival, there is no carnival left.”

— Victor Hugo

“To think of shadows is a serious thing.”

— Victor Hugo

“Try as you will, you cannot annihilate that eternal relic of the human heart, love. ”

— Victor Hugo

“Wisdom is a sacred communion.”

— Victor Hugo

“Toleration is the best religion.”

— Victor Hugo

“Indigestion is charged by God with enforcing morality on the stomach.”

— Victor Hugo

“The mountains, the forest, and the sea, render men savage; they develop the fierce, but yet do not destroy the human. ”

— Victor Hugo

“Initiative is doing the right thing without being told.”

— Victor Hugo

“Our acts make or mar us, we are the children of our own deeds.”

— Victor Hugo

“It is from books that wise people derive consolation in the troubles of life.”

— Victor Hugo

“Genius is a promontory jutting out into the infinite.”

— Victor Hugo

“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

“Close by the Rights of Man, at the least set beside them, are the Rights of the Spirit.”

— Victor Hugo

“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. ”

— Victor Hugo