Quotes from Victor Hugo

I refuse the oration of all churches. I ask a prayer of all souls. I believe in God.

As for methods of prayer, all of them are good as long as they are sincere.

Those who always pray are necessary to those who never pray.

Reason is intelligence taking exercise. Imagination is intelligence with an erection.

Intelligence is the wife, imagination is the mistress, memory is the servant.

Every step which the intelligence of Europe has taken has been in spite of the clerical party.

One day of happiness is worth more than a lifetime of sorrow .... Under ordinary circumstances, jealousy is a suspicion to the person who excites it and degrading to the person who indulges it.

Everything being a constant carnival, there is no carnival left.

To contemplate is to look at shadows.

Stupidity talks, vanity acts.

Hell is an outrage on humanity. When you tell me that your deity made you in his image, I reply that he must have been very ugly.

I believe in religion against the religious; in the pitifulness of orisons, and in the sublimity of prayer.

No religion but blasphemes a little.

Anger may be foolish and absurd, and one may be wrongly irritated, but a man never feels outraged unless in some respect he is fundamentally right.

Knowledge is a weight added to conscience.

Change your opinions, keep to your principles; change your leaves, keep intact your roots.

Nations, like stars, are entitled to eclipse. All is well, provided the light returns and the eclipse does not become endless night. Dawn and resurrection are synonymous. The reappearance of the light is the same as the survival of the soul.

Jesus wept; Voltaire smiled. From that divine tear and from that human smile is derived the grace of present civilization.

Almost all our desires, when examined, contain something too shameful to reveal.

Despotism is a long crime.

I put a Phrygian cap on the old dictionary.

One of the hardest tasks is to extract continually from one's soul an almost inexhaustible ill will.

Melancholy is the pleasure of being sad.

Melancholy is the happiness of being sad.