1,711 Quotes by Victor Hugo

The sewer is the conscience of the city.

Strong and rare natures are thus created; misery, almost always a stepmother, is sometimes a mother; privation gives birth to power of soul and mind; distress is the nurse of self-respect; misfortune is a good breast for great souls.

The spirit of God, like the sun, always gives all its light at once. The spirit of man resembles the pale moon, which has its phases, its absences and its returns, its lucidity and its spots, its fullness and its disappearance, which borrows all its light from the rays of the sun, and which still dares to intercept them on occasion.

The first proof of charity in a priest, especially a bishop, is poverty.

A day will come when a cannon will be exhibited in museums, just as instruments of torture are now, and the people will be astonished that such a thing could have been.

Blessed be Providence which has given to each his toy: the doll to the child, the child to the woman, the woman to the man, the man to the devil!

Love is jealous, and ingenious in self-torture in proportion as it is pure and intense.

A little girl without a doll is almost as unhappy, and quite as impossible, as a woman without children." from chapter VIII of Les Miserables

To divinise is human, to humanise is divine.