1,711 Quotes by Victor Hugo

The flesh is the surface of the unknown.

What is called honors and dignities, and even honor and dignity, is generally fool's gold.

As we have said, robust souls are sometimes almost, but not entirely, overthrown by strokes of misfortune....Despair has steps leading upward. From total depression we rise to despondency, from despondency to affliction, from affliction to melancholy. Melancholy is a twilight state in which suffering transmutes into a somber joy....Melancholy is the enjoyment of being sad.

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

Stupidity talks, vanity acts.

The hatred of luxury is not an intelligent hatred. It implies a hatred of arts.

Foppery is the egotism of clothes.

Despots play their part in the works of thinkers. Fettered words are terrible words. The writer doubles and trebles the power of his writing when a ruler imposes silence on the people. Something emerges from that enforced silence, a mysterious fullness which filters through and becomes steely in the thought. Repression in history leads to conciseness in the historian, and the rocklike hardness of much celebrated prose is due to the tempering of the tyrant.

The left-handed are precious; they take places which are inconvenient for the rest.