Victor Hugo Book Quotations

It is from books that wise people derive consolation in the troubles of life.

To learn to read is to light a fire; every syllable that is spelled out is a spark.

Architecture has recorded the great ideas of the human race. Not only every religious symbol, but every human thought has its page in that vast book.

He loved books; books are cold but safe friends.

So long as ignorance and poverty exist on earth, books of the nature of Les Miserables cannot fail to be of use.

The book which the reader now holds in his hands, from one end to the other, as a whole and in its details, whatever gaps, exceptions, or weaknesses it may contain, treats of the advance from evil to good, from injustice to justice, from falsity to truth, from darkness to daylight, from blind appetite to conscience, from decay to life, from bestiality to duty, from Hell to Heaven, from limbo to God. Matter itself is the starting-point, and the point of arrival is the soul. Hydra at the beginning, an angel at the end.

M. Mabeuf’s political opinion was a passionate fondness for plants, and a still greater one for books. He had, like everybody else, his termination in ist, without which nobody could have lived in those times, but he was neither a royalist, nor a Bonapartist, nor a chartist, nor an Orleanist, nor an anarchist; he was an old-bookist.

The author creates a book and the people accept or not accept it. The creator of a book is an author and the creator of it`s fate are people.

Every man is a book in which God himself writes.

Human intelligence discovered a way of perpetuating itself, one not only more durable and more resistant than architecture, but also simpler and easier. Architecture was dethroned. The stone letters of Orpheus gave way to the lead letters of Gutenburg. The book will kill the edifice.

In 1815, M. Charles Francois-Bienvenu Myriel was Bishop of D-----. He was a man of seventy-five, and had occupied the bishopric of D----- since 1806. Although it in no manner concerns, even in the remotest degree, what we have to relate, it may not be useless, were it only for the sake of exactness in all things, to notice here the reports and gossip which had arisen on his account from the time of his arrival in the diocese.

It is those books which a man possesses but does not read which constitute the most suspicious evidence against him.

When a person opens a book, he can never be in prison.

This book should be read as one would read the book of a dead man.

England has two books, the Bible and Shakespeare. England made Shakespeare,but the Bible made England.

He was fond of books, for they are cool and sure friends

He never went out without a book under his arm, and he often came back with two.