Quotes from Victor Hugo

Les grands périls ont cela de beau qu'ils mettent en lumière la fraternité des inconnus.

The mind is a garden, said he.

Ideas can no more flow backward than can a river.

What a gloomy thing not to know the address of one's soul!

The flesh is the surface of the unknown.

The women laughed and wept; the crowd stamped their feet enthusiastically, for at that moment Quasimodo was really beautiful. He was handsome — this orphan, this foundling, this outcast.

Women are more credulous than men.

Tall and thin, Mademoiselle Baptistine was a pale and gentle person. She was the incarnation of the word 'respectable, ' whereas to be 'venerable, ' a woman should lso be a mother.

It is God who makes woman beautiful it is the devil who makes her pretty.

There are no rules, no models; rather, there are no rules other than the general laws of Nature.

Winter is on my head, and eternal spring is in my heart.

...that word which GOD... has written on the brow of every man: hope!

Let us be like that unafraid bird Lighted upon a twig that swings Feeling it yield but singing on— For knowing that he has wings!

My day's work will begin again the next morning. The tomb is not a blind alley.

Let us fear the worst, but work with faith; the best will always take care of itself.

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

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.

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

Life is a flower of which love is the honey.

Wisdom is a sacred communion.

When grace combines with wrinkles, it is admirable. There is an indescribable light of dawn about intensely happy old age. . . . The young person is handsome, but the old, superb.

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.

Great buildings, like great mountains, are the work of centuries.

No doubt it was necessary to civilize man in relation to man. That work is already advanced and is making progress every day. But man must be civilized also in relation to nature.