Quotes from Victor Hugo

Try as you will, you cannot annihilate that eternal relic of the human heart, love.

The great acts of love are done by those who are habitually performing small acts of kindness.

I am an intelligent river which has reflected successively all the banks before which it has flowed by meditating only on the images offered by those changing shores.

Evil. Mistrust those who rejoice at it even more than those who do it.

If you are stone, be magnetic; if a plant, be sensitive; but if you are human be love.

Life is a flower of which love is honey.

Woe, alas, to those who have loved only bodies, forms, appearances! Death will rob them of everything. Try to love souls, you will find them again.

As we have explained, in first love the soul is taken long before the body; later the body is taken long before the soul; sometimes the soul is not taken at all.

Love is reducing the universe to one being.

If he had had all Peru in his pocket, he would certainly have given it to this dancer; but Gringoire had not Peru in his pocket; and besides, America was not yet discovered. (p. 66)

I'm religiously opposed to religion.

I would have liked to be - indeed, I should have been - a second Rembrandt.

Idleness is the heaviest of all oppressions.

An intelligent hell would be better than a stupid paradise.

Thought is more than a right - it is the very breath of man. Whoever fetters thought attacks man himself. To speak, to write, to publish, are things, so far as the right is concerned, absolutely identical. They are the ever-enlarging circles of intelligence in action; they are the sonorous waves of thought.

He had, they said, tasted in succession all the apples of the tree of knowledge, and, whether from hunger or disgust, had ended by tasting the forbidden fruit.

To rise from error to truth is rare and beautiful.

To die for lack of love is horrible. The asphyxia of the soul.

To love is the half of to believe.

where would the shout of love begin, if not from the summit of sacrifice?

What love commences can be finished by God alone.

This child whom we Love, Brings daylight Into our soul.

They say love is blindness of heart; I say not to love is blindness.

To love or have loved is all-sufficing. We must not ask for more. No other pearl is to be found in the shadowfolds of life. To love is an accomplishment.