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
Victor Hugo quotes about
It is in the name of Moses that Bellarmin thunderstrikes Galileo; and this great vulgarizer of the great seeker Copernicus, Galileo, the old man of truth, the magian of the heavens, was reduced to repeating on his knees word for word after the inquisitor this formula of shame: "Corde sincera et fide non ficta abjuro maledico et detestor supradictos errores et hereses." Falsehood put an ass's hood on science.
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.
We see past time in a telescope and present time in a microscope. Hence the apparent enormities of the present.
[T]he small is great, the great is small; all is in equilibrium in necessity...
Science says the first word on everything, and the last word on nothing.
Because a fact seems strange to you, you conclude that it is not one. ... All science, however, commences by being strange. Science is successive. It goes from one wonder to another. It mounts by a ladder. The science of to-day would seem extravagant to the science of a former time. Ptolemy would believe Newton mad.
The power of a glance has been so much abused in love stories that it has come to be disbelieved. Few people daresay nowadays that two beings have fallen in love because they have looked at eachother. Yet that is the way love begins, and only that way.
Where the telescope ends, the microscope begins. Which of the two has the grander view?
There is nothing like a dream to create the future.
Life, misfortunes, isolation, abandonment, poverty, are battlefields which have their heroes; obscure heroes, sometimes greater than the illustrious heroes
The peculiarity of prudery is to multiply sentinels, in proportion as the fortress is less threatened
An invasion of armies can be resisted, but not the invasion of ideas.
Anger may be foolish and obsurd, and one may be irritated when in the wrong; but a man never feels outraged unless in some respect he is at bottom right.
Be like the bird that, pausing in her flight awhile on boughs too slight, feels them give way beneath her, and yet sings, knowing that she hath wings.