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
When a man understands the art of seeing, he can trace the spirit of an age and the features of a king even in the knocker on a door.
The hatred of luxury is not an intelligent hatred. It implies a hatred of arts.
Homer is one of the men of genius who solve that fine problem of art - the finest of all, perhaps - truly to depict humanity by the enlargement of man: that is, to generate the real in the ideal.
God manifests himself to us in the first degree through the life of the universe, and in the second degree through the thought of man. The second manifestation is not less holy than the first. The first is named Nature, the second is named Art.
Science is continually correcting what it has said. Fertile corrections... science is a ladder... poetry is a winged flight... An artistic masterpiece exists for all time... Dante does not efface Homer.
Dear God! how beauty varies in nature and art. In a woman the flesh must be like marble; in a statue the marble must be like flesh.
His judgement demonstrates that one can be a genius and understand nothing of an art that is not one's own.
Beauty is as useful as the useful. More so, perhaps. (Le beau est aussi utile que l'utile. Plus peut-etre.)
Music is the vapor of art. It is to poetry what reverie is to thought, what fluid is to solid, what the ocean of clouds is to the ocean of waves.
Art needs no spur beyond itself.
For true poetry, complete poetry, consists in the harmony of contraries. Hence, it is time to say aloud--and it is here above allthat exceptions prove the rule--that everything that exists in nature exists in art.
The aim of art is almost divine: to bring to life again if it is writing history, to create if it is writing poetry.
The true artist can only labor con amore.
People generally will soon understand that writers should be judged, not according to rules and species, which are contrary to nature and art, but according to the immutable principles of the art of composition, and the special laws of their individual temperaments.