1,711 Quotes by Victor Hugo

At that moment of love, a moment when passion is absolutely silent under omnipotence of ecstasy, Marius, pure seraphic Marius, would have been more capable of visiting a woman of the streets than of raising Cosette’s dress above the ankle. Once on a moonlit night, Cosette stopped to pick up something from the ground, her dress loosened and revealed the swelling of her breasts. Marius averted his eyes.

The earlier works of a man of genius are always preferred to the newer ones, in order to prove that he is going down instead of up.

Heaven, on occasion, half opens its arms to us; and that is the great moment.

All the forces in the world are not so powerful as an idea whose time has come.

There is one spectacle grander than the sea, That is the sky.

I was always a lover of soft-winged things.

A translation in verse . . . seems to me something absurd, impossible.

The last resort of kings, the cannonball. The last resort of the people, the paving stone.

The jostling of young minds against each other has this wonderful attribute that one can never foresee the spark, nor predict the flash. What will spring up in a moment? Nobody knows. A burst of laughter starts from a scene of emotion. In a moment of buffoonery, the serious enters. Impulses depend on a chance word. The spirit of each is sovereign. A jest suffices to open the door to the unexpected. They are conferences with sharp turns, where the perspective suddenly changes. Chance is the director of these conversations.