Author · French · 1802 – 1885 · 181 quotes
The wise man does not grow old, but ripens.
Victor Hugo
Author · French · 1802 – 1885
The word is the Verb, and the Verb is God.
Be like the bird who, pausing in her flight awhile on boughs too slight, feels them give way beneath her, and yet sings, knowing she hath wings.
Adversity makes men, and prosperity makes monsters.
Everything being a constant carnival, there is no carnival left.
To rise from error to truth is rare and beautiful.
Curiosity is one of the forms of feminine bravery.
Pain is as diverse as man. One suffers as one can.
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.
Do not let it be your aim to be something, but to be someone.
One sees qualities at a distance and defects at close range.
No one ever keeps a secret so well as a child.
An intelligent hell would be better than a stupid paradise.
No one can keep a secret better than a child.
As the purse is emptied, the heart is filled.
He who opens a school door, closes a prison.
People do not lack strength; they lack will.
Men become accustomed to poison by degrees.
The beautiful has but one type, the ugly has a thousand.
When dictatorship is a fact, revolution becomes a right.
The learned man knows that he is ignorant.
Initiative is doing the right thing without being told.
One believes others will do what he will do to himself.
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.
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.
Genius is a promontory jutting out into the infinite.
A compliment is something like a kiss through a veil.
Many great actions are committed in small struggles.
It is by suffering that human beings become angels.
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.
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.
It is nothing to die. It is frightful not to live.
My tastes are aristocratic, my actions democratic.
Scepticism, that dry caries of the intelligence.
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.
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.
Fashions have done more harm than revolutions.
Idleness is the heaviest of all oppressions.
I put a Phrygian cap on the old dictionary.
To love beauty is to see light.
The flesh is the surface of the unknown.
Prayer is an august avowal of ignorance.
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.
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!
A library implies an act of faith.
Conscience is God present in man.
A war between Europeans is a civil war.
Perseverance, secret of all triumphs.
