Quotes from Victor Hugo

The onward march of the human race requires that the heights around it constantly blaze with noble lessons of courage. Deeds of daring dazzle history and form one of man's guiding lights.

Genius: the superhuman in man.

Marius and Cosette did not ask where this would lead them. They looked at themselves as arrived. It is a strange pretension for men to ask that love should lead them somewhere.

Social prosperity means man happy, the citizen free, the nation great.

That is to be two and to be but one. A man and a woman mingled into one angel. It is heaven.

Great griefs exhaust. They discourage us with life. The man into whom they enter feels something taken from him. In youth, their visit is sad; later on, it is ominous.

We should judge a man much more surely from what he dreams than from what he thinks.

I dislike wealth and prosperity, especially that of other men.

Cheerfulness is like money well expended in charity; the more we dispense of it, the greater our possession.

A mother's arms are made of tenderness and children sleep soundly in them.

Mothers arms are made of tenderness, And sweet sleep blesses the child who lies therein.

Gutenberg's invention of printing is the greatest event-the mother of revolution

Idleness is a mother. She has a son, robbery, and a daughter, hunger.

The peasants of the Asturias believe that in every litter of wolves there is one pup that is killed by the mother for fear that on growing up it would devour the other little ones.

He never went out without a book under his arm, and he often came back with two.

...It all seemed to him to have disappeared as if behind a curtain at a theater. There are such curtains that drop in life. God is moving on to the next act.

Music expresses that which cannot be put into words.

There is one spectacle grander than the sea, That is the sky.

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

As a means of contrast with the sublime, the grotesque is, in our view, the richest source that nature can offer.

Nature has made a pebble and a female. The lapidary makes the diamond, and the lover makes the woman.

Dear God! how beauty varies in nature and art.

So long as ignorance and poverty exist on earth, books of the nature of Les Miserables cannot fail to be of use.

We are reassured almost as foolishly as we are alarmed; human nature is so constituted.