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Victor Hugo

Victor Hugo Quotes

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Famous Victor Hugo Quotes

“When people look back at their childhood or youth, their wistfulness comes from the memory, not of what their lives had been in those years, but of what life had then promised to be. The expectation of some indefinable splendor, of the unusual, the exciting, the great is an attribute of youth and the process of aging is the process of that expectations' gradual extinction. One does not have to let it happen. But that fire dies for lack of fuel, under the gray weight of disappointments.”

PeopleYearsLooksDoeHappensDiesProcessMemoriesFireChildhoodYouthExpectationsWeightExcitingAgingDisappointmentFuelGrayUnusualAttributesExtinctionSplendorIndefinableWistfulness
Author:Victor Hugo
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“These Greek capitals, black with age, and quite deeply graven in the stone, with I know not what signs peculiar to Gothic calligraphy imprinted upon their forms and upon their attitudes, as though with the purpose of revealing that it had been a hand of the Middle Ages which had inscribed them there, and especially the fatal and melancholy meaning contained in them, struck the author deeply.”

KnowsHandsAgeFormPurposeBlackAttitudeMiddleStonesGreekMelancholyPeculiarRevealingMiddle AgesGothicCalligraphy
Author:Victor Hugo
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“The word Gothic, in the sense in which it is generally employed, is wholly unsuitable, but wholly consecrated. Hence we accept it and we adopt it, like all the rest of the world, to characterize the architecture of the second half of the Middle Ages, where the ogive is the principle which succeeds the architecture of the first period, of which the semi-circle is the father.”

WorldFirstsAgeFatherHalfAcceptingPrinciplesMiddlePeriodsSucceedArchitectureCirclesEmployedMiddle AgesGothic
Book:The Works of Victor Hugo
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“We shall not attempt to give the reader an idea of that tetrahedron nose-that horse-shoe mouth-that small left eye over-shadowed by a red bushy brow, while the right eye disappeared entirely under an enormous wart-of those straggling teeth with breaches here and there like the battlements of a fortress-of that horny lip, over which one of those teeth projected like the tusk of an elephant-of that forked chin-and, above all, of the expression diffused over the whole-that mixture of malice, astonishment, and melancholy. Let the reader, if he can, figure to himself this combination.”

IfsGivingIdeasWholeEyeLeftFiguresExpressionReaderMouthsRedHorseShoesLipsEnormousTeethCombinationNosesMelancholyElephantsMixturesHere And ThereMaliceChinsBrowsAstonishmentHornyBreachFortressesWartsLeft Eye
Book:The Novels of Victor Hugo: Profusely Illustrated with Elegant Wood Engravings
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“Nothing is more dangerous than to stop working. It is a habit that can soon be lost, one that is easily neglected and hard to resume. A measure of day-dreaming is a good thing, like a drug prudently used ... But too much submerges and drowns. Woe to the intellectual worker who allows himself to lapse wholly from positive thinking into day-dreaming. He thinks he can easily change back, and tells himself that it is all one. He is wrong! To substitute day-dreaming for thought is to confuse poison with a source of nourishment.”

ThinkingHardDreamUsedLostToo MuchDangerousPositive ThinkingSourceHabitDrugIntellectualGood ThingsWorkersPoisonWorking ItSubstitutesWoeNeglectedNourishmentResumesLapsesLost Ones
Author:Victor Hugo
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