Victor Hugo
Victor Hugo
Victor Marie Hugo; 26 February 1802 – 22 May 1885) was a French poet, novelist, and dramatist of the Romantic movement. He is considered one of the greatest and best-known French writers. In France, Hugo's literary fame comes first from his poetry and then from his novels and his dramatic achievements. Among many volumes of poetry, Les Contemplations and La Légende des siècles stand particularly high in critical esteem. Outside France, his best-known works are the novels Les Misérables, 1862,...
NationalityFrench
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth26 February 1802
CityBesancon, France
CountryFrance
The repose of darkness is deeper on the water than on the land.
There is such a thing as the pressure of darkness.
Dirt has been shrewdly termed "misplaced material.
Every body drags its shadow, and every mind its doubt.
Earnestness is the salt of eloquence.
There is no rapture in the love which is prompted by esteem; such affection is lasting, not passionate.
No religion but blasphemes a little.
To see so much misery everywhere, I suspect that God is not rich. He keeps up appearances, it is true, but I feel the pinch. He gives a revolution as a merchant, whose credit is low, gives a ball.
Great grief is a divine and terrible radiance which transfigures the wretched.
Youth, even in its sorrows, always has a brilliancy of its own.
Despots play their part in the works of thinkers. Fettered words are terrible words. The writer doubles and trebles the power of his writing when a ruler imposes silence on the people. Something emerges from that enforced silence, a mysterious fullness which filters through and becomes steely in the thought. Repression in history leads to conciseness in the historian, and the rocklike hardness of much celebrated prose is due to the tempering of the tyrant.
Nature, like a kind and smiling mother, lends herself to our dreams and cherishes our fancies.
To rove about, musing, that is to say loitering, is, for a philosopher, a good way of spending time, especially in that kind of mock rurality, ugly but odd, and partaking of two natures, which surrounds certain large cities, particularly Paris.
I am for religion, against religions.