Quotes from Victor Hugo

Wisdom is a sacred communion.

All the forces in the world are not so powerful as an idea whose time has come.

These two halves of God, the Pope and the emperor.

To rise from error to truth is rare and beautiful.

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.

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

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.

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

The clouds, — the only birds that never sleep.

A war between Europeans is a civil war.

Waterloo! Waterloo! Waterloo! Dismal plain!

Peace is the virtue of civilization. War is its crime.

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

Many great actions are committed in small struggles.

A great artist is a great man in a great child.

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.

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.

Smallness in a great man seems smaller by its disproportion with all the rest.

There are fathers who do not love their children there is no grandfather who does not adore his grandson.

When God desires to destroy a thing, he entrusts its destruction to the thing itself. Every bad institution of this world ends by suicide.

Dear God! how beauty varies in nature and art. In a woman the flesh must be like marble in a statue the marble must be like flesh.

The supreme happiness of life is the conviction that we are loved — loved for ourselves, or rather, loved in spite of ourselves.

You have created a new thrill.

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.