“To give thanks in solitude is enough. Thanksgiving has wings and goes where it must go. Your prayer knows much more about it than you do.”
– Victor Hugo
“A mother’s arms are made of tenderness and children sleep soundly in them.”
– Victor Hugo
“One is not idle because one is absorbed. There is both visible and invisible labor. To contemplate is to toil, to think is to do. The crossed arms work, the clasped hands act. The eyes upturned to Heaven are an act of creation.”
– Victor Hugo
“We say that slavery has vanished from European civilization, but this is not true. Slavery still exists, but now it applies only to women and its name is prostitution.”
– Victor Hugo
“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.”
– Victor Hugo
“Wisdom is a sacred communion.”
– Victor Hugo
“Civil war? What does that mean? Is there any foreign war? Isn’t every war fought between men, between brothers?”
– Victor Hugo
“Peace is the virtue of civilization. War is its crime.”
– Victor Hugo
“A war between Europeans is a civil war.”
– Victor Hugo
“To rise from error to truth is rare and beautiful.”
– Victor Hugo
“There is one thing stronger than all the armies in the world, and that is an idea whose time as come.”
– Victor Hugo
“Greater than the tread of mighty armies is an idea whose time has come.”
– Victor Hugo
“We see past time in a telescope and present time in a microscope. Hence the apparent enormities of the present.”
– Victor Hugo
“Nothing else in the world… not all the armies… is so powerful as an idea whose time has come.”
– Victor Hugo
“An invasion of armies can be resisted, but not an idea whose time has come.”
– Victor Hugo
“Short as life is, we make it still shorter by the careless waste of time.”
– Victor Hugo
“All the forces in the world are not so powerful as an idea whose time has come.”
– Victor Hugo
“Sorrow is a fruit. God does not make it grow on limbs too weak to bear it.”
– Victor Hugo
“People do not lack strength they lack will.”
– Victor Hugo
“Freedom in art, freedom in society, this is the double goal towards which all consistent and logical minds must strive.”
– Victor Hugo
“Society is a republic. When an individual tries to lift themselves above others, they are dragged down by the mass, either by ridicule or slander.”
– Victor Hugo
“Joy’s smile is much closer to tears than laughter.”
– Victor Hugo
“Jesus wept Voltaire smiled. From that divine tear and from that human smile is derived the grace of present civilization.”
– Victor Hugo
“Toleration is the best religion.”
– Victor Hugo
“I’m religiously opposed to religion.”
– Victor Hugo
“All the forces in the world are not so powerful as an idea whose time has come.”
– Victor Hugo
“The drama is complete poetry. The ode and the epic contain it only in germ it contains both of them in a state of high development, and epitomizes both.”
– Victor Hugo
“Rhyme, that enslaved queen, that supreme charm of our poetry, that creator of our meter.”
– Victor Hugo
“Peace is the virtue of civilization. War is its crime.”
– Victor Hugo
“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.”
– Victor Hugo