Victor Hugo quotes

“Prayer is an august avowal of ignorance.”

— Victor Hugo

“Do not let it be your aim to be something, but to be someone.”

— Victor Hugo

“Conscience is God present in man.”

— Victor Hugo

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

— Victor Hugo

“Men become accustomed to poison by degrees.”

— Victor Hugo

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

— Victor Hugo

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

— Victor Hugo

“Perseverance, secret of all triumphs.”

— Victor Hugo

“The learned man knows that he is ignorant.”

— Victor Hugo

“I am a soul. I know well that what I shall render up to the grave is not myself. That which is myself will go elsewhere. Earth, thou art not my abyss! ”

— Victor Hugo

“The ox suffers, the cart complains.”

— Victor Hugo

“Style is the substance of the subject called unceasingly to the surface.”

— Victor Hugo

“Taste is the common sense of genius.”

— Victor Hugo

“The flesh is the surface of the unknown.”

— Victor Hugo

“Rhyme, that enslaved queen, that supreme charm of our poetry, that creator of our meter. ”

— Victor Hugo

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

— Victor Hugo

“Stupidity talks, vanity acts.”

— Victor Hugo

“Idleness is the heaviest of all oppressions.”

— Victor Hugo

“The ode lives upon the ideal, the epic upon the grandiose, the drama upon the real.”

— Victor Hugo

“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.”

— Victor Hugo

“The soul has illusions as the bird has wings: it is supported by them.”

— Victor Hugo

“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.”

— Victor Hugo

“Pain is as diverse as man. One suffers as one can.”

— Victor Hugo

“Scepticism, that dry caries of the intelligence.”

— Victor Hugo

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

— Victor Hugo

“One of the hardest tasks is to extract continually from one's soul an almost inexhaustible ill will.”

— Victor Hugo

“The omnipotence of evil has never resulted in anything but fruitless efforts. Our thoughts always escape from whoever tries to smother them.”

— Victor Hugo

“The little people must be sacred to the big ones, and it is from the rights of the weak that the duty of the strong is comprised.”

— Victor Hugo

“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.”

— Victor Hugo

“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.”

— Victor Hugo