Victor Hugo Quotes

Piety is the most solid goodness, and the vilest of what is evil is vice.

Be virtuous and you will be vicious.

It seems to me that if God calls us to anything it's to a life of integrity.

Virtue must be valuable, if men and women of all degrees pretend to have it.

Truth made you a traitor as it often does in a time of scoundrels.

The wicked are always surprised to find ability in the good.

Many a thief is a better man than many a clergyman, and miles nearer to the gate of the kingdom.

Immorality: the morality of those who are having a better time.

We value virtue but do not discuss it. The honest bookkeeper, the faithful wife, the earnest scholar get little of our attention compared to the embezzler, the tramp, the cheat.

I myself have constantly refused to print anything that might countenance vice or promote immorality, though … I might have gotten much money.

Vice, in its true light, is so deformed, that it shocks us at first sight; and would hardly ever seduce us, if it did not at first wear the mask of some virtue.

There is no principle worth the name if it is not wholly good.

Rarely do great beauty and great virtue dwell together.

Successful and fortunate crime is called virtue.

It is not easy to do something good, but it is extremely difficult to do something bad.

Win if you can, lose if you must, but always cheat.

Shun all vice, especially card playing.

Elegance is inferior to virtue.

Our virtues are most frequently but vices disguised.

Nothing that is morally wrong can be politically right.

To do no evil is good, to intend none better.

Only a writer who has the sense of evil can make goodness readable.

Hypocrisy is not a way of getting back to the moral high ground. Pretending you're moral, saying your moral is not the same as acting morally.

All the gold which is under or upon the earth is not enough to give in exchange for virtue.

Truth is the beginning of every good to the gods, and of every good to man.