Victor Hugo Quotes

A man is not idle because he is absorbed in thought. There is a visible labor and there is an invisible labor.

A man is not idle because he is absorbed in thought. There is visible labour and there is invisible labour.

Emergencies have always been necessary to progress. It was darkness which produced the lamp. It was fog that produced the compass. It was hunger that drove us to exploration. And it took a depression to teach us the real value of a job.

Have courage for the great sorrows of life and patience for the small ones; and when you have laboriously accomplished your daily task, go to sleep in peace. God is awake.

He who every morning plans the transaction of the day and follows out that plan, carries a thread that will guide him through the maze of the most busy life. But where no plan is laid, where the disposal of time is surrendered merely to the chance of incidence, chaos will soon reign.

I don't mind what Congress does, as long as they don't do it in the streets and frighten the horses.

If a writer wrote merely for his time, I would have to break my pen and throw it away.

Laughter is the sun that drives winter from the human face.

Music expresses that which cannot be put into words and that which cannot remain silent.

Popularity? It is glory's small change.

What a grand thing, to be loved! What a grander thing still, to love!

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

An invasion of armies can be resisted, but not an idea whose time has come.

If suffer we must, let's suffer on the heights.

To be a saint is the exception; to be upright is the rule. Err, falter, sin, but be upright. To commit the least possible sin is the law for man. Sin is a gravitation.

There is always more misery among the lower classes than there is humanity in the higher.

He who abandons the field is beaten.

Nothing discernable to the eye of the spirit is more brilliant or obscure than man; nothing is more formidible, complex, mysterious, and infinite. There is a prospect greater than the sea, and it is the sky; there is a prospect greater than the sky, and it is the human soul.

The quantity of civilization is measured by the quality of imagination.

There are no trifles in the human story, no trifling leaves on the tree.

To die is nothing; but it is terrible not to live.

Where the telescope ends the microscope begins, and who can say which has the wider vision?

Work is the law of life, and to reject it as boredom is to submit to it as torment.

Work, which makes a man free, and thought, which makes him worthy of freedom.

Life's greatest happiness is to be convinced we are loved.

There is nothing like dream to create the future. Utopia to-day, flesh and blood tomorrow.

Love is like a tree, it grows of its own accord, it puts down deep roots into our whole being.

Do you know what friendship is... it is to be brother and sister; two souls which touch without mingling, two fingers on one hand.