1802-1885, French Poet, Dramatist, Novelist
A compliment is something like a kiss through a veil.
Victor Hugo – [Compliments]
A creditor is worse than a slave-owner; for the master owns only your person, but a creditor owns your dignity, and can command it.
Victor Hugo – [Debt]
A library implies an act of faith.
Victor Hugo – [Libraries]
A man is not idle because he is absorbed in thought. There is visible labor and there is invisible labor.
Victor Hugo – [Idleness]
A saint addicted to excessive self-abnegation is a dangerous associate; he may infect you with poverty, and a stiffening of those joints which are needed for advancement — in a word, with more renunciation than you care for — and so you flee the contagion.
Victor Hugo – [Saints]
Adversity makes men, and prosperity makes monsters.
Victor Hugo – [Adversity]
As the purse is emptied, the heart is filled.
Victor Hugo – [Charity]
Be as a bird perched on a frail branch that she feels bending beneath her, still she sings away all the same, knowing she has wings.
Victor Hugo – [Animals]
Certain thoughts are prayers. There are moments when, whatever be the attitude of the body, the soul is on its knees.
Victor Hugo – [Attitude]
Close by the Rights of Man, at the least set beside them, are the Rights of the Spirit.
Victor Hugo – [Human Rights]
Common sense is in spite of, not as the result of education.
Victor Hugo – [Common Sense]
Curiosity is one of the forms of feminine bravery.
Victor Hugo – [Curiosity]
Despots play their part in the works of thinkers. Fettered words are terrible words. The writer doubles and trebles the power of his writing when a ruler imposes silence on the people. Something emerges from that enforced silence, a mysterious fullness which filters through and becomes steely in the thought. Repression in history leads to conciseness in the historian, and the rocklike hardness of much celebrated prose is due to the tempering of the tyrant.
Victor Hugo – [Despotism]
Do not ask the name of the person who seeks a bed for the night. He who is reluctant to give his name is the one who most needs shelter.
Victor Hugo – [Poverty and The Poor]
Each man should frame life so that at some future hour fact and his dreaming meet.
Victor Hugo – [Planning]
England has two books, one which she has made and one which has made her: Shakespeare and the Bible.
Victor Hugo – [Bible]
For prying into any human affairs, non are equal to those whom it does not concern.
Victor Hugo – [Gossip]
Forty is the old age of youth, fifty is the youth of old age.
Victor Hugo – [Age and Aging]
From the oyster to the eagle, from the swine to the tiger, all animals are to be found in men and each of them exists in some man, sometimes several at the time. Animals are nothing but the portrayal of our virtues and vices made manifest to our eyes, the visible reflections of our souls. God displays them to us to give us food for thought.
Victor Hugo – [Animals]
Genius is a promontory jutting out into the infinite.
Victor Hugo – [Genius]