Victor Hugo (1802-1885)

Quotes

• What a grand thing, to be loved! What a grander thing still, to love!

• Music expresses that which cannot remain silent and that which cannot be put into words.

• Do you know what friendship is... it is to be brother and sister; two souls which touch without mingling, two fingers on one hand.

• Oh! love!... That is to be two and to be but one. A man and a woman mingled into one angel. It is heaven.

• The greatest happiness of life is the conviction that we are loved; loved for ourselves, or rather, loved in spite of ourselves.

• Clearly he had his own strange way of judging things. I suspect he acquired it from the gospels.

• Emergencies have always been necessary to progress. It was darkness which produced the lamp. It was fog that produced the compass. It was hunger that drove us to exploration. And it took a depression to teach us the real value of a job.

• Love is like a tree, it grows of its own accord, it puts down deep roots into our whole being.

• There are no trifles in the human story, no trifling leaves on the tree.

• He who abandons the field is beaten.

• Work, which makes a man free, and thought, which makes him worthy of freedom.

• Where the telescope ends the microscope begins, and who can say which has the wider vision?

• Work is the law of life, and to reject it as boredom is to submit to it as torment.

• The quantity of civilization is measured by the quality of imagination.

• To die is nothing; but it is terrible not to live.

• Music expresses that which cannot be put into words and that which cannot remain silent.

• A study can be made against invasion by an army; no stand can be made against invasion by an idea.

• If a writer wrote merely for his time, I would have to break my pen and throw it away.

• Life's greatest happiness is to be convinced we are loved.

• Have courage for the great sorrows of life and patience for the small ones; and when you have laboriously accomplished your daily task, go to sleep in peace. God is awake.