The beautiful has but one type, the ugly has a thousand.
Victor Hugo

The brutalities of progress are called revolutions. When they are over we realize this: that the human race has been roughly handled, but that it has advanced.
Victor Hugo

The drama is complete poetry. The ode and the epic contain it only in germ; it contains both of them in a state of high development, and epitomizes both.
Victor Hugo

The first symptom of love in a young man is timidity; in a girl boldness.
Victor Hugo

The flesh is the surface of the unknown.
Victor Hugo

The greatest happiness of life is the conviction that we are loved; loved for ourselves, or rather, loved in spite of ourselves.
Victor Hugo

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.
Victor Hugo

The ideal and the beautiful are identical; the ideal corresponds to the idea, and beauty to form; hence idea and substance are cognate.
Victor Hugo

The last resort of kings, the cannonball. The last resort of the people, the paving stone.
Victor Hugo

The learned man knows that he is ignorant.
Victor Hugo

The little people must be sacred to the big ones, and it is from the rights of the weak that the duty of the strong is comprised.
Victor Hugo

The man who does not know other languages, unless he is a man of genius, necessarily has deficiencies in his ideas.
Victor Hugo

The most powerful symptom of love is a tenderness which becomes at times almost insupportable.
Victor Hugo

The mountains, the forest, and the sea, render men savage; they develop the fierce, but yet do not destroy the human.
Victor Hugo

The ode lives upon the ideal, the epic upon the grandiose, the drama upon the real.
Victor Hugo

The omnipotence of evil has never resulted in anything but fruitless efforts. Our thoughts always escape from whoever tries to smother them.
Victor Hugo

The ox suffers, the cart complains.
Victor Hugo

The soul has illusions as the bird has wings: it is supported by them.
Victor Hugo

The supreme happiness of life is the conviction that we are loved; loved for ourselves, or rather in spite of ourselves.
Victor Hugo

The three great problems of this century; the degradation of man in the proletariat, the subjection of women through hunger, the atrophy of the child by darkness.
Victor Hugo