Victor Hugo Men Quotations

I met in the street a very poor young man who was in love. His hat was old, his coat worn, his cloak was out at the elbows, the water passed through his shoes, - and the stars through his soul.

The convent, which belongs to the West as it does to the East, to antiquity as it does to the present time, to Buddhism and Muhammadanism as it does to Christianity, is one of the optical devices whereby man gains a glimpse of infinity.

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!

The three great problems of this century; the degradation of man in the proletariat, the subjection of women through hunger, the atrophy of the child by darkness.

A great artist is a great man in a great child.

The animal is ignorant of the fact that he knows. The man is aware of the fact that he is ignorant.

Each man should frame life so that at some future hour fact and his dreaming meet.

Hope is the word which God has written on the brow of every man.

The first symptom of love in a young man is timidity; in a girl boldness.

The mountains, the forest, and the sea, render men savage; they develop the fierce, but yet do not destroy the human.

Whenever a man's friends begin to compliment him about looking young, he may be sure that they think he is growing old.

I love all men who think, even those who think otherwise than myself.

The learned man knows that he is ignorant.

Pain is as diverse as man. One suffers as one can.

Religions do a useful thing: they narrow God to the limits of man. Philosophy replies by doing a necessary thing: it elevates man to the plane of God.

The wise man does not grow old, but ripens.

A man is not idle because he is absorbed in thought. There is a visible labor and there is an invisible labor.

Doing nothing is happiness for children and misery for old men.

The man who does not know other languages, unless he is a man of genius, necessarily has deficiencies in his ideas.

When a man is out of sight, it is not too long before he is out of mind.

Men like me are impossible until the day when they become necessary.

There have been in this century only one great man and one great thing: Napoleon and liberty. For want of the great man, let us have the great thing.

Smallness in a great man seems smaller by its disproportion with all the rest.

Close by the Rights of Man, at the least set beside them, are the Rights of the Spirit.

Man's greatest actions are performed in minor struggles. Life, misfortune, isolation, abandonment and poverty are battlefields which have their heroes - obscure heroes who are at times greater than illustrious heroes.

Babylon violated diminishes Alexander; Rome enslaved diminishes Caesar; massacred Jerusalem diminishes Titus. Tyranny follows the tyrant. Woe to the man who leaves behind a shadow that bears his form.

God made only water, but man made wine.

If a man has his throat cut in Paris, it's a murder. If 50,000 people are murdered in the east, it is a question.

A man without a woman is like a pistol without a trigger; it is the woman who makes the man go off.

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

What is said about men often has as much influence upon their lives, and especially upon their destinies, as what they do.

Love is the foolishness of men, and the wisdom of God.

The straight line, a respectable optical illusion which ruins many a man.

The first symptom of true love in a man is timidity, in a young woman, boldness. This is surprising, and yet nothing is more simple. It is the two sexes tending to approach each other and assuming each the other's qualities.

Adversity makes men, and prosperity makes monsters.

Such is the remorseless progression of human society, shedding lives and souls as it goes on its way. It is an ocean into which men sink who have been cast out by the law and consigned, with help most cruelly withheld, to moral death. The sea is the pitiless social darkness into which the penal system casts those it has condemned, an unfathomable waste of misery. The human soul, lost in those depths, may become a corpse. Who shall revive it?

Nothing discernible to the eye of the spirit is more brilliant or obscure than man; nothing is more formidable, complex, mysterious, and infinite. There is a prospect greater than the sea, and it is the sky; there is a prospect greater than the sky, and it is the human soul.

Conscience is God present in man.

Nothing makes a man so adventurous as an empty pocket.

True or false, that which is said of men often occupies as important a place in their lives, and above all in their destinies, as that which they do.

Do you hear the people sing? Singing a song of angry men

First it was necessary to civilize man in relation to man. Now it is necessary to civilize man in relation to nature and the animals.

In the animal world no creature born to be a dove turns into a scavenger. This happens only among men.

The man is placed where the Earth ends, the woman, where the heaven starts.

This book should be read as one would read the book of a dead man.

All roads are blocked to a philosophy which reduces everything to the word "no." To "no" there is only one answer and that is "yes." Nihilism has no substance. There is no such thing as nothingness, and zero does not exist. Everything is something. Nothing is nothing. Man lives more by affirmation than by bread.

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.

And, moreover, when it happens that both are sincere and good, nothing will mix and amalgamate more easily than an old priest and an old soldier. In reality, they are the same kind of man. One has devoted himself to country upon earth, the other to his country in heaven; there is no other difference.

A man trying to escape never thinks himself sufficiently concealed.

Not ill? No truly, I am young, healthful, and strong; the blood flows freely in my veins; my limbs obey my will; I am robust in mind and body, constituted for a long life. Yes, all this is true; and yet, nevertheless, I have an illness, a fatal illness,-an illness given by the hand of man!

Wonderful nature has a double meaning, which dazzles great minds and blinds uncultivated souls. When man is ignorant, when the desert is filled with visions, the darkness of solitude is added to the darkness of intelligence; hence, in man, the possibilities of perdition

Death belongs to God alone; by what right do men touch that unknown thing?

Genius: the superhuman in man.

The miserable's name is Man; he is agonizing in all climes, and he is groaning in all languages.

One of the hardest labours of the just man is to expunge from his soul a malevolence which it is difficult to efface.

We should judge a man much more surely from what he dreams than from what he thinks.

You have enemies? Why, it is the story of every man who has done a great deed or created a new idea.

Let us leave to the brain what belongs to it, and agree that the work of the men of genius is of the superhuman, the offspring of man.

Solitude either develops the mental power, or renders men dull and vicious.

A poet is a world enclosed in a man.

Humanity is our common lot. All men are made of the same clay. There is no difference, at least here on Earth, in the fate assigned to us. We come of the same void, inhabit the same flesh, are dissolved in the same ashes. But ignorance infecting the human substance turns it black, and that incurable blackness, gaining possession of the soul, becomes Evil.

It is the peculiarity of grief to bring out the childish side of man.

It is those books which a man possesses but does not read which constitute the most suspicious evidence against him.

God became man, granted. The devil became a woman.

God put in man thought; society, action; nature, revery.

Women are more credulous than men.

A wretched woman is more unfortunate than a wretched man.

To rise at six, to dine at ten, To sup at six, to sleep at ten, Makes a man live for ten times ten.

It may be remarked in passing that success is an ugly thing. Men are deceived by its false resemblences to merit.

In 1815, M. Charles Francois-Bienvenu Myriel was Bishop of D-----. He was a man of seventy-five, and had occupied the bishopric of D----- since 1806. Although it in no manner concerns, even in the remotest degree, what we have to relate, it may not be useless, were it only for the sake of exactness in all things, to notice here the reports and gossip which had arisen on his account from the time of his arrival in the diocese.

Creation lives, grows, and multiplies; man is but a witness.

Progress is the life-style of man.

God has bestowed two gifts on man: hope and ignorance. Ignorance is the better of the two.

Man does not understand nor accept immortality except on condition of self-remembrance.

Religion, Society, and Nature--these are the three struggles of man.

If God had intended that man should go backward, he would have given him eyes in the back of his head.

If you want to civilize a man, begin with his grandmother.

God blesses man, not for having found but for having sought.

A thousand men enslaved fear one beast free.

Man lives more by affirmation than by bread.

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.

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

Social prosperity means man happy, the citizen free, the nation great.

Every man is a book in which God himself writes.

Whom man kills, him God restoreth to life.

Marius and Cosette did not ask where this would lead them. They looked at themselves as arrived. It is a strange pretension for men to ask that love should lead them somewhere.

But alas, if I have not maintained my victory, it is God's fault for not making man and the devil of equal strength.

It is grievous for a man to leave behind him a shadow in his own shape.

Do not forget, do not ever forget, that you have promised me to use the money to make yourself an honest man.' Valjean, who did not recall having made any promise, was silent. The bishop had spoken the words slowly and deliberately. He concluded with a solemn emphasis: Jean Valjean, my brother, you no longer belong to what is evil but to what is good. I have bought your soul to save it from black thoughts and the spirit of perdition, and I give it to God.

Every good quality runs into a defect; economy borders on avarice, the generous are not far from the prodigal, the brave man is close to the bully; he who is very pious is slightly sanctimonious; there are just as many vices to virtue as there are holes in the mantle of Diogenes.

Forget not, never forget that you have promised me to use this silver to become an honest man.... Jean Valjean, my brother: you belong no longer to evil, but to good. It is your soul that I am buying for you. I withdraw it from dark thoughts and from the spirit of perdition, and I give it to God!

There are no weeds, and no worthless men. There are only bad farmers.

A benevolent malefactor, merciful, gentle, helpful, clement, a convict, returning good for evil, giving back pardon for hatred, preferring pity to vengeance, preferring to ruin himself rather than to ruin his enemy, saving him who had smitten him, kneeling on the heights of virtue, more nearly akin to an angel than to a man. Javert was constrained to admit to himself that this monster existed. Things could not go on in this manner.

There are things stronger than the strongest man...

If you are leaving that sorrowful place with hate and anger against men, you are worthy of compassion; if you leave it with good will, gentleness and peace, you are better than any of us.

Men become accustomed to poison by degrees.

In this way, his unhappy soul struggled with its anguish. Eighteen hundred years before this unfortunate man, the mysterious Being, in whom all the sanctities and all the sufferings of humanity come together, He too, while the olive trees trembled in the fierce breath of the Infinite, had brushed away the fearful cup that appeared before him, streaming with shadow and running over with darkness, in the star-filled depths. (pg. 236)

That men saw his mask, but the bishop saw his face. That men saw his life, but the bishop saw his conscience.

His universal compassion was due less to natural instinct, than to a profound conviction, a sum of thoughts that in the course of living had filtered through to his heart: for in the nature of man, as in rock, there may be channels hollowed by the dropping of water, and these can never be destroyed.

Great griefs exhaust. They discourage us with life. The man into whom they enter feels something taken from him. In youth, their visit is sad; later on, it is ominous.