“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.”
More from Victor Hugo on Philosophy
“This is the shade of difference: the door of the physician should never be shut, the door of the priest should always be open.”
“What makes night within us may leave stars.”
“Melancholy is the happiness of being sad.”
“This cavern is below all, and the enemy of all; it is hatred, without exception.”
“Thought is the toil of the intelligence, revery its voluptuousness. To replace thought with revery is to confound a poison with a food.”
“Nothing is more imminent than the impossible . . . what we must always foresee is the unforeseen.”
“An intelligent hell would be better than a stupid paradise.”
“Something more terrible than a hell where one suffers may be imagined, and that is a hell where one is bored.”
Others on Philosophy
Ludwig Wittgenstein
22 quotes“The logic of the world is prior to all truth and falsehood.”
Christopher Hitchens
22 quotes“How much vanity must be concealed – not too effectively at that – in order to pretend that one is the personal object of...”
Nietzsche
22 quotes“One does not hate as long as one has a low esteem of someone, but only when one esteems him as an equal or a superior.”
Carl Jung
21 quotes“The pendulum of the mind oscillates between sense and nonsense, not between right and wrong.”
Immanuel Kant
20 quotes“Morality is not the doctrine of how we may make ourselves happy, but how we may make ourselves worthy of happiness.”
Heraclitus
19 quotes“All things flow nothing abides.”
H. L. Mencken
17 quotes“We are here and it is now. Further than that, all human knowledge is moonshine.”
C.S. Lewis
15 quotes“[Consciousness] is either inexplicable illusion, or else revelation.”
Fyodor Dostoevsky
14 quotes“Consciousness is man's greatest misfortune, still I know that man loves it and will not exchange it for any satisfaction...”
Samuel Beckett
14 quotes“The end is in the beginning and yet you go on.”
Napoleon
14 quotes“Nothing is more difficult, and therefore more precious, than to be able to decide.”
Isaac Asimov
13 quotes“Society is much more easily soothed than one's own conscience.”