The ideal and the beautiful are identical the ideal corresponds to the idea, and beauty to form hence idea and substance are cognate.
– Victor Hugo
The drama is complete poetry. The ode and the epic contain it only in germ it contains both of them in a state of high development, and epitomizes both.
– Victor Hugo
Sorrow is a fruit. God does not make it grow on limbs too weak to bear it.
– Victor Hugo
Smallness in a great man seems smaller by its disproportion with all the rest.
– Victor Hugo
Short as life is, we make it still shorter by the careless waste of time.
– Victor Hugo
Scepticism, that dry caries of the intelligence.
– Victor Hugo
Rhyme, that enslaved queen, that supreme charm of our poetry, that creator of our meter.
– Victor Hugo
Religions do a useful thing: they narrow God to the limits of man. Philosophy replies by doing a necessary thing: it elevates man to the plane of God.
– Victor Hugo
People do not lack strength they lack will.
– Victor Hugo
Our life dreams the Utopia. Our death achieves the Ideal.
– Victor Hugo
Nature has made a pebble and a female. The lapidary makes the diamond, and the lover makes the woman.
– Victor Hugo
Men like me are impossible until the day when they become necessary.
– Victor Hugo
Men become accustomed to poison by degrees.
– Victor Hugo
Many great actions are committed in small struggles.
– Victor Hugo
Love is a portion of the soul itself, and it is of the same nature as the celestial breathing of the atmosphere of paradise.
– Victor Hugo
Jesus wept Voltaire smiled. From that divine tear and from that human smile is derived the grace of present civilization.
– Victor Hugo
Intelligence is the wife, imagination is the mistress, memory is the servant.
– Victor Hugo
I'm religiously opposed to religion.
– Victor Hugo
I love all men who think, even those who think otherwise than myself.
– Victor Hugo
I am a soul. I know well that what I shall render up to the grave is not myself. That which is myself will go elsewhere. Earth, thou art not my abyss!
– Victor Hugo
Freedom in art, freedom in society, this is the double goal towards which all consistent and logical minds must strive.
– Victor Hugo
Doing nothing is happiness for children and misery for old men.
– Victor Hugo
Dear God! how beauty varies in nature and art. In a woman the flesh must be like marble in a statue the marble must be like flesh.
– Victor Hugo
Conscience is God present in man.
– Victor Hugo
Change your opinions, keep to your principles change your leaves, keep intact your roots.
– Victor Hugo
Because one doesn't like the way things are is no reason to be unjust towards God.
– Victor Hugo
As a means of contrast with the sublime, the grotesque is, in our view, the richest source that nature can offer.
– Victor Hugo
Amnesty is as good for those who give it as for those who receive it. It has the admirable quality of bestowing mercy on both sides.
– Victor Hugo
A war between Europeans is a civil war.
– Victor Hugo
A mother's arms are made of tenderness and children sleep soundly in them.