Quotes from Victor Hugo

We do not comprehend everything, but we insult nothing.

The wind of revolutions is not tractable.

On this point, the priest and the philosopher agree: We must die.

Nothing is more dangerous than discontinued labor; it is habit lost. A habit easy to abandon, difficult to resume.

We are for religion against the religions.

Those who pray always are necessary to those who never pray. In our view, the whole question is in the amount of thought that is mingled with prayer.

I only take a half share in the civil war; I am willing to die, I am not willing to kill.

He who is not master of his own thoughts is not accountable for his own deeds.

Close by the Rights of Man, at the least set beside them, are the Rights of the Spirit.

Common sense is in spite of, not as the result of education.

In the French language, there is a great gulf between prose and poetry; in English, there is hardly any difference. It is a splendid privilege of the great literary languages Greek, Latin, and French that they possess a prose. English has not this privilege. There is no prose in English.

Have but luck, and you will have the rest; be fortunate, and you will be thought great.

It is from books that wise men derive consolation in the troubles of life.

To destroy abuses is not enough; Habits must also be changed. The windmill has gone, but the wind is still there." ~old man G--- to Monseigneur Bienvenu Myriel

The three great problems of this century; the degradation of man in the proletariat, the subjection of women through hunger, the atrophy of the child by darkness.

The wise man does not grow old, but ripens.

And then, strange to say, the first symptom of true love in a young man is timidity; in a girl, it is boldness.

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

God made only water, but man made wine.

A man without a woman is like a pistol without a trigger; it is the woman who makes the man go off.

Every man is a book in which God himself writes.

Word which the finger of God has written on the brow of every man — hope!

It is man's consolation that the future is to be a sunrise instead of a sunset.

Smallness in a great man seems smaller by its disproportion with all the rest.