1,711 Quotes by Victor Hugo

As for us, we respect the past here and there, and we spare it, above all, provided that it consents to be dead. If it insists on being alive, we attack it, and we try to kill it.

His ideas assumed a kind of stupefied and mechanical quality which is peculiar to despair.

The shadow of the passions of the moment transversed this grand and gentle spirit occupied with eternal things.

What is more melancholy and more profound than to see a thousand objects for the first and the last time? To travel is to be born and to die at every instant...

He had the confidence of a man who had never been wounded.

What makes night within us may leave stars.

The sadness which reigned everywhere was but an excuse for unfailing kindness.

He said, moreover, "Teach those who are ignorant as many things as possible; society is culpable, in that it does not afford instruction gratis; it is responsible for the night which it produces. This soul is full of shadow; sin is therein committed. The guilty one is not the person who has committed the sin, but the person who has created the shadow."It will be perceived that he had a peculiar manner of his own of judging things: I suspect that he obtained it from the Gospel.

From a political point of view, there is but one principle, the sovereignty of man over himself. This sovereignty of myself over myself is called Liberty