Victor Hugo Quotes

"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."

"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."

"A compliment is something like a kiss through a veil."

"Progress is the life-style of man. The general life of the human race is called Progress, and so is its collective march. Progress advances, it makes the great human and earthly journey towards what is heavenly and divine; it has its pauses, when it rallies the stragglers, its stopping places when it meditates, contemplating some new and splendid promised land that has suddenly appeared on its horizon. It has its nights of slumber; and it is one of the poignant anxieties of the thinker to see the human spirit lost in shadow, and to grope in the darkness without being able to awake sleeping progress."

"Life is the flower for which love is the honey."

"Progress is the stride of God."

"The greatest happiness of life is the conviction that we are loved; loved for ourselves, or rather, loved in spite of ourselves."

"Let us have compassion for those under chastisement. Alas, who are we ourselves? Who am I and who are you? Whence do we come and is it quite certain that we did nothing before we were born? This earth is not without some resemblance to a gaol. Who knows but that man is a victim of divine justice? Look closely at life. It is so constituted that one senses punishment everywhere."

"When dictatorship is a fact, revolution becomes a right"

"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."

"A compliment is like a kiss through a veil."

"Be as a bird perched on a frail branch that she feels bending beneath her, still she sings away all the same, knowing she has wings."

"He, who every morning plans the transactions of the day, and follows that plan, carries a thread that will guide him through a labyrinth of the most busy life."

"An invasion of armies can be resisted, but not an idea whose time has come."

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

"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."

"The most powerful symptom of love is a tenderness which becomes at times almost insupportable."

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

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

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