1,711 Quotes by Victor Hugo

Humanity is identity. All men are the same clay. No difference, here below at least, in predestination. The same darkness before, the same flesh during, the same ashes after life. But ignorance, mixed with the human composition, blackens it. This incurable ignorance possesses the heart of man, and there becomes evil.

Men are still men. The despot’s wickedness Comes of ill teaching, and of power’s excess, – Comes of the purple he from childhood wears, Slaves would be tyrants if the chance were theirs.

Sleep in Peace, God is awake.

Gutenberg’s invention of printing is the greatest event-the mother of revolution.

There is something more terrible than a hell of suffering – a hell of boredom.

Reaction – a boat which is going against the current but which does not prevent the river from flowing on.

Nothing is more true, more real, than the primeval magnetic disturbances that two souls may communicate to one another, through the tiny sparks of a moment’s glance.

A criminal remains a criminal whether he uses a convict’s suit or a monarch’s crown.

Machiavelli is not an evil genius, nor a demon, nor a miserable and cowardly writer; he is nothing but the fact. And he is not only the Italian fact; he is the European fact, the fact of the sixteenth century. He seems hideous, and so he is, in the presence of the moral idea of the nineteenth.