Mankind is not a circle with a single center but an ellipse with two focal points of which facts are one and ideas the other.

Victor Hugo

The human soul has still greater need of the ideal than of the real. It is by the real that we exist; it is by the ideal that we live.

Victor Hugo

To contemplate is to look at shadows.

Victor Hugo

An invasion of armies can be resisted, but not an idea whose time has come.

Victor Hugo

Go out in the world and work like money doesn’t matter, sing as if no one is listening, love as if you have never been hurt, and dance as if no one is watching.

Victor Hugo

We say that slavery has vanished from European civilization, but this is not true. Slavery still exists, but now it applies only to women and its name is prostitution.

Victor Hugo

Doing nothing is happiness for children and misery for old men.

Victor Hugo

Do not let it be your aim to be something, but to be someone.

Victor Hugo

Caution is the eldest child of wisdom.

Victor Hugo

To give thanks in solitude is enough. Thanksgiving has wings and goes where it must go. Your prayer knows much more about it than you do.

Victor Hugo

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

Strong and bitter words indicate a weak cause.

Victor Hugo

Progress is the stride of God.

Victor Hugo

Concision in style, precision in thought, decision in life.

Victor Hugo

Virtue has a veil, vice a mask.

Victor Hugo

One can resist the invasion of an army but one cannot resist the invasion of ideas.

Victor Hugo

To die is nothing; but it is terrible not to live.

Victor Hugo

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

Victor Hugo

Despotism is a long crime.

Victor Hugo

Slaves would be tyrants were the chance theirs.

Victor Hugo

There is one spectacle grander than the sea, that is the sky; there is one spectacle grander than the sky, that is the interior of the soul.

Victor Hugo

A faith is a necessity to a man. Woe to him who believes in nothing.

Victor Hugo

Wherever the Turkish hoof trods, no grass grows.

Victor Hugo

What a grand thing, to be loved What a grander thing still, to love

Victor Hugo

The beautiful has but one type, the ugly has a thousand.

Victor Hugo

If a man has his throat cut in Paris, it's a murder. If 50,000 people are murdered in the east, it is a question.

Victor Hugo

Nature has made a pebble and a female. The lapidary makes the diamond, and the lover makes the woman.

Victor Hugo

Have courage for the great sorrows of life and patience for the small ones; and when you have laboriously accomplished your daily task, go to sleep in peace.

Victor Hugo

Each man should frame life so that at some future hour fact and his dreaming meet.

Victor Hugo

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.

Victor Hugo

Freedom in art, freedom in society, this is the double goal towards which all consistent and logical minds must strive.

Victor Hugo

Fashions have done more harm than revolutions.

Victor Hugo

A library implies an act of faith.

Victor Hugo

If you look in the eyes of the young, you see flame. If you look in the eyes of the old, you see light.

Victor Hugo