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
To love another person is to see the face of God.
Separated lovers cheat absence by a thousand fancies which have their own reality. They are prevented from seeing one another and they cannot write; nevertheless they find countless mysterious ways of corresponding, by sending each other the song of birds, the scent of flowers, the laughter of children, the light of the sun, the sighing of the wind, and the gleam of the stars -all the beauties of creation.
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.
It is not easy to keep silent when silence is a lie.
Morality is truth in full bloom.
Mankind is not a circle with a single center but an ellipse with two focal points of which facts are one and ideas the other.
No army can withstand the strength of an idea whose time has come.
Initiative is doing the right thing without being told.
Even the darkest night will end and the sun will rise.
I advance in life, I grow more simple, and I become more and more patriotic for humanity.
Go out in the world and work like money doesn't matter, sing as if no one is listening, love as if you have never been hurt, and dance as if no one is watching.
The human soul has still greater need of the ideal than of the real. It is by the real that we exist; it is by the ideal that we live.
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.
A translation in verse . . . seems to me something absurd, impossible.