Victor Hugo Quotes

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Victor Hugo

Profession : Author

Birth : February 26, 1802

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

Victor Hugo

Nothing else in the world... not all the armies... is so powerful as an idea whose time has come.

Victor Hugo

Almost all our desires, when examined, contain something too shameful to reveal.

Victor Hugo

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

Victor Hugo

It is the end. But of what? The end of France? No. The end of kings? Yes.

Victor Hugo

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

Victor Hugo

To be perfectly happy it does not suffice to possess happiness, it is necessary to have deserved it.

Victor Hugo

Men like me are impossible until the day when they become necessary.

Victor Hugo

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.

Victor Hugo

Stupidity talks, vanity acts.

Victor Hugo

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

Victor Hugo

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

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 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.

Victor Hugo

Love is jealous, and ingenious in self-torture in proportion as it is pure and intense.

Victor Hugo

How did it happen that their lips came together? How does it happen that birds sing, that snow melts, that the rose unfolds, that the dawn whitens behind the stark shapes of trees on the quivering summit of the hill? A kiss, and all was said.

Victor Hugo

Every diminution of the liberty of the press is followed by a diminution of civilization. Wherever we see the freedom of the press interfered with, there we see the nutrition of the human family interrupted.

Victor Hugo

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

Victor Hugo

The learned man knows that he is ignorant.

Victor Hugo

There is no such thing as a little country. The greatness of a people is no more determined by their numbers than the greatness of a man is by his height.

Victor Hugo