Author · French · 1802 – 1885 · 181 quotes
No one knows like a woman how to say things which are at once gentle and deep.
Victor Hugo
Author · French · 1802 – 1885
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.
Joy's smile is much closer to tears than laughter.
Intelligence is the wife, imagination is the mistress, memory is the servant.
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.
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.
The last resort of kings, the cannonball. The last resort of the people, the paving stone.
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.
Reaction - a boat which is going against the current but which does not prevent the river from flowing on.
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.
A great artist is a great man in a great child.
Common sense is in spite of, not as the result of education.
Strong and bitter words indicate a weak cause.
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.
He who is not capable of enduring poverty is not capable of being free.
Sublime upon sublime scarcely presents a contrast, and we need a little rest from everything, even the beautiful.
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.
Evil. Mistrust those who rejoice at it even more than those who do it.
When God desires to destroy a thing, he entrusts its destruction to the thing itself. Every bad institution of this world ends by suicide.
The ode lives upon the ideal, the epic upon the grandiose, the drama upon the real.
What a grand thing, to be loved! What a grander thing still, to love!
Indigestion is charged by God with enforcing morality on the stomach.
But when ill indeed, Even dismissing the doctor don't always succeed.
The omnipotence of evil has never resulted in anything but fruitless efforts. Our thoughts always escape from whoever tries to smother them.
Men like me are impossible until the day when they become necessary.
The wicked envy and hate; it is their way of admiring.
Peace is the virtue of civilization. War is its crime.
Almost all our desires, when examined, contain something too shameful to reveal.
Never laugh at those who suffer; suffer sometimes those who laugh.
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.
Society is a republic. When an individual tries to lift themselves above others, they are dragged down by the mass, either by ridicule or slander.
There is nothing like a dream to create the future.
What would be ugly in a garden constitutes beauty in a mountain.
Thought is the labor of the intellect, reverie is its pleasure.
Have courage for the great sorrows of life and patience for the small ones; and when you have laboriously accomplished your daily task, go to sleep in peace.
To love another person is to see the face of God.
Our acts make or mar us, we are the children of our own deeds.
Hell is an outrage on humanity. When you tell me that your deity made you in his image, I reply that he must have been very ugly.
Life is the flower for which love is the honey.
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.
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.
It is the end. But of what? The end of France? No. The end of kings? Yes.
By putting forward the hands of the clock you shall not advance the hour.
Concision in style, precision in thought, decision in life.
Laughter is the sun that drives winter from the human face.
Style is the substance of the subject called unceasingly to the surface.
Forty is the old age of youth; fifty the youth of old age.
Our life dreams the Utopia. Our death achieves the Ideal.
