A compliment is something like a kiss through a veil.
Victor Hugo

A creditor is worse than a slave-owner; for the master owns only your person, but a creditor owns your dignity, and can command it.
Victor Hugo

A faith is a necessity to a man. Woe to him who believes in nothing.
Victor Hugo

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

A library implies an act of faith.
Victor Hugo

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

A mother's arms are made of tenderness and children sleep soundly in them.
Victor Hugo

A war between Europeans is a civil war.
Victor Hugo

Adversity makes men, and prosperity makes monsters.
Victor Hugo

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


Almost all our desires, when examined, contain something too shameful to reveal.
Victor Hugo

Amnesty is as good for those who give it as for those who receive it. It has the admirable quality of bestowing mercy on both sides.
Victor Hugo

An intelligent hell would be better than a stupid paradise.
Victor Hugo

An invasion of armies can be resisted, but not an idea whose time has come.
Victor Hugo

Architecture has recorded the great ideas of the human race. Not only every religious symbol, but every human thought has its page in that vast book.
Victor Hugo

As a means of contrast with the sublime, the grotesque is, in our view, the richest source that nature can offer.
Victor Hugo

As the purse is emptied, the heart is filled.
Victor Hugo

Be as a bird perched on a frail branch that she feels bending beneath her, still she sings away all the same, knowing she has wings.
Victor Hugo

Be like the bird who, pausing in her flight awhile on boughs too slight, feels them give way beneath her, and yet sings, knowing she hath wings.
Victor Hugo

Because one doesn't like the way things are is no reason to be unjust towards God.
Victor Hugo