Quotes from Victor Hugo

There are no rules for felicity.

Dry happiness is like dry bread. We eat, but we do not dine. I wish for the superfluous, for the useless, for the extravagant, for the too much, for that which is not good for anything.

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.

Forty is the old age of youth; fifty the youth of old age.

In short, I am doing what I can, I suffer with the same universal suffering, and I try to assuage it, I possess only the puny forces of a man, and I cry to all: "Help me!

A house is built of logs and stone, of tiles and posts and piers; a home is built of loving deeds that stand a thousand years.

It is not so easy to keep silent when the silence is a lie.

You ask me what forces me to speak? a strange thing; my conscience.

What is called honors and dignities, and even honor and dignity, is generally fool's gold.

There is no distress so complete but that even in the most critical moments the inexplicable sunrise of hope is seen in its depths.

Hope is the word which God has written on the brow of every man.

Homer is one of the men of genius who solve that fine problem of art - the finest of all, perhaps - truly to depict humanity by the enlargement of man: that is, to generate the real in the ideal.

Each man should frame life so that at some future hour fact and his dreaming meet.

Certain thoughts are prayers. There are moments when, whatever be the attitude of the body, the soul is on its knees.

As long as ignorance and misery exist in the world, books like the one you are about to read are, perhaps, not entirely useless

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 poet who is a bad man is a degraded being, baser and more culpable than a bad man who is not a poet.

To learn to read is to light a fire; every syllable that is spelled out is a spark.

Inanimate objects sometimes appear endowed with a strange power of sight. A statue notices, a tower watches, the face of an edifice contemplates.

Solitude either develops the mental power, or renders men dull and vicious.

More powerful than the mighty armies is an idea whose time has come.

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.

Prayer is an august avowal of ignorance.

We are on the side of religion as opposed to religions, and we are among those who believe in the wretched inadequacy of sermons and the sublimity of prayer.